Christine (63 page)

And oh God I had such a case of the creeps.

We saw the New Year in.

Arnie produced a couple of noisemakers and party favors—the kind that go bang and then release a cloud of tiny crepe streamers. We toasted 1979 and talked a little more on neutral subjects such as the Phillies' disappointing collapse in the playoffs and the Steelers' chances of going all the way to the Super Bowl.

The bowl of popcorn was down to the old maids and the burny-bottoms when I took myself in hand and asked one of the questions I had been avoiding. "Arnie? What do you think happened to Darnell?"

He glanced at me sharply, then glanced back at the TV, where couples with New Year's confetti in their hair were dancing. He drank some more beer. "The people he was doing business with shut him up before he could talk too much. That's what I think happened."

"The people he was working for?"

"Will used to say the Southern Mob was bad," Arnie said, "but that the Colombians were even worse."

"Who are the

"The Colombians?" Arnie laughed cynically. "Cocaine cowboys, that's who the Colombians are. Will used to claim they'd kill you if you even looked at one of their women the wrong way—and sometimes if you looked at her the right way. Maybe it was the Colombians. It was messy enough to be them."

"Were you running coke for Darnell?"

He shrugged. "I was running
stuff
for Will. I only moved coke for him once or twice, and I thank Christ that I didn't have anything worse than untaxed cigarettes when they picked me up. They caught me dead-bang. Bad shit. But if the situation was the same, I'd probably do it again. Will was a dirty, scuzzy old sonofabitch, but in some ways he was okay." His eyes grew veiled, strange. "Yeah, in some ways he was okay. But he knew too much. That's why he got wasted. He knew too much… and sooner or later he would have said something, Probably it was the Colombians. Crazy fuckers."

"I don't get you. And it's not my business, I suppose."

He looked at me, grinned, and winked. "It was Vietnam," he said. "At least, it was supposed to be. There was a guy named Henry Buck. He was supposed to rat on me. I was supposed to rat on Will. And then—the big casino—Will was supposed to rat on the people down South that were selling him the dope and the fireworks and cigarettes and booze. Those were the people Ju—the cops really wanted, Especially the Colombians."

"And you think they killed him?"

He looked at me flatly. "Them or the Southern Mob, sure. Who else?"

I shook my head.

"Well," he said, "Let's have another beer and then I'll give you a lift home. I enjoyed this, Dennis, I really did." There was a ring of truth in that, but Arnie would never have made a dorky comment like "I enjoyed this, I really did." Not the old Arnie.

"Yeah, me too, man."

I didn't want another beer, but I took one anyway. I wanted to put off the inevitable moment of getting into Christine. This afternoon it had seemed a necessary step to sample the atmosphere of that car itself if there was any atmosphere to sample. Now it seemed a frightening and crazy idea. I felt the secret of what Leigh and I were becoming to each other like a large, breakable egg in my head.

Tell me, Christine, can you read minds?

I felt a crazy laugh coming up my throat and dumped beer on it.

"Listen," I said. "I can call my dad to come and get me, if you want, Arnie. He'll still be up."

"No problem," Arnie said. "I could walk two miles of straight line, don't worry."

"I just thought—"

"Bet you're anxious to be able to drive yourself around again, huh?"

"Yeah, I am."

"There's nothing finer than being behind the wheel of your own car," Arnie said, and then his left eye slipped down in a bleary old roue's wink. "Except maybe pussy."

The time came. Arnie snapped off the TV and I crutched my way across the kitchen and worked into my old ski parka, hoping that Michael and Regina would come in from their party and delay things a while longer—maybe Michael would smell beer on Arnie's breath and offer me a ride. The memory of the afternoon I had slipped behind Christine's wheel, when Arnie was in LeBay's house, dickering with the old sonofabitch, was all too clear in my mind.

Arnie had gotten a couple of beers from the fridge—"for the road", he said. I considered telling him that if he got picked up DWI while he was on bail, he'd probably go to jail before he could turn around. Then I decided I better keep my mouth shut. We went out.

The first early morning of 1979 was deeply, clearly cold, the kind of cold that makes the moisture in your nose freeze in seconds. The snowbanks ringing the driveway glittered with billions of diamond crystals. And there sat Christine, her black windows cauled with frost. I stared at her.
The Mob
, Arnie had said.
The Southern Mob or the Colombians
. It sounded melodramatic but possible—no, more; it sounded plausible. But the Mob shot people, pushed them out of windows, strangled them. According to legend, Al Capone had disposed of one poor sucker with a lead-cored baseball bat. But to drive a car over some guy's snow covered lawn and slam it through the side of his house and into his living room?

The Colombians, maybe. Arnie said the Colombians are crazy
. But
that
crazy? I didn't think so.

She glittered in the light from the house and the stars, and what if it was her? And what if she found out that Leigh and I had our suspicions? Worse yet, what if she found out that we had been fooling around?

"You need help on the steps, Dennis?" Arnie asked, startling me.

"No, I can handle the steps," I said. "You might have to give me a hand on the path."

"No problem, man."

I got down the kitchen steps sidesaddle, clutching the railing in one hand and my crutches in the other. On the path, I set them under me, got out a couple of steps, and then slipped. A dull thud of pain rumbled up my left leg, the one that still wasn't worth doodly-squat. Arnie grabbed me.

"Thanks," I said, glad of a chance to sound shaky.

"No sweat."

We got over to the car, and Arnie asked if I could get in by myself. He left me and crossed around the front of Christine's hood. I got hold of the doorhandle with one gloved hand, and a hopeless feeling of dread and revulsion swept over me. It wasn't until then that I really began to believe it, deep inside, where a person lives. Because that doorhandle felt alive under my hand. It felt like some living beast that was asleep. The doorhandle didn't feel like chromed steel; dear Christ, it felt like skin. It seemed as if I could squeeze it and wake the beast up, roaring.

Beast?

Okay,
what
beast?

What was it? Some sort of
afreet
?. An ordinary car that had somehow become the dangerous, stinking dwelling-place of a demon? A weird manifestation of LeBay's lingering personality, a hellish haunted house that rolled on Goodyear rubber? I didn't know. All I knew was that I was scared, terrified. I didn't think I could go through with this.

"Hey, you okay?" Arnie asked. "Can you make it?"

"I can make it," I said hoarsely, and jammed my thumb down on the button below the handle. I opened the door, turned my back on the seat, and let myself fall backward onto it, left leg extending stiffly. I got hold of my leg and swung it in. It was like moving a piece of furniture. My heart was triphammering in my chest. I pulled the door shut.

Arnie turned the key and the motor rumbled to life—as if the engine were hot instead of dead cold. And the smell assaulted me, seeming to come from everywhere, but most of all seeming to pour up from the upholstery: the sick, rotten smell of death and decay.

I don't know how to tell you about that ride home, that three-mile ride that lasted no more than ten or twelve minutes, without sounding like an escapee from a lunatic asylum. There is no way to be objective about it; just sitting here and trying is enough to make me feel cold and hot at the same time, feverish and ill. There is no way to separate what was real and what my mind might have manufactured; no dividing line between objective and subjective, between the truth and horrified hallucination. But it wasn't drunkenness; if I can assure you of nothing else, I can assure you of that. Any mild high I retained from the beer evaporated immediately. What followed was a cold-sober tour of the country of the damned.

We went back in time, for one thing.

For a while Arnie wasn't driving at all; it was LeBay, rotting and stinking of the grave, half skeleton and half rotting, spongy flesh, greenly corroded buttons. Maggots squirmed their sluggish way up from his collar. I could hear a low buzzing sound and thought at first it was a short circuit in one of the dashboard lights. It was only later that I began to think it might have been the sound of flies hatching in his flesh. Of course it was wintertime, but—

At times, there seemed to be other people in the car with us. Once I glanced up into the rearview mirror and saw a wax dummy of a woman staring at me with the bright and sparkling eyes of a stuffed trophy. Her hair was done in a '50s pageboy style. Her cheeks appeared to have been wildly rouged, and I remembered that carbon monoxide poisoning was supposed to give the illusion of life and high color. Later, I glanced into the mirror again and seemed to see a little girl back there, her face blackened with strangulation, her eyes popping like those of some cruelly squeezed stuffed animal. I shut my eyes tight and when I opened them it was Buddy Repperton and Richie Trelawney in the rearview mirror. Crusted blood had dried on Buddy's mouth, chin, neck, and shirt. Richie was a roasted hulk—but his eyes were alive and aware.

Slowly Buddy extended his arm. He was holding a bottle of Texas Driver in one blackened hand.

I closed my eyes once more. And after that, I didn't look into the rearview anymore.

I remember rock and roll on the radio: Dion and the Belmonts, Ernie K-Doe, the Royal Teens, Bobby Rydell ("Oh, Bobby, oh… everything's cool… we're glad you go to a swingin school…").

I remember that for a while red Styrofoam dice seemed to be hanging from the rearview mirror, then for a while there were baby shoes, and then there was neither one.

Most of all I remembering seizing the idea that these things, like the smell of rotting flesh and mouldy upholstery, were only in my mind—that they were no more than the mirages that haunt the consciousness of an opium-eater.

I was like someone who is badly stoned and trying to make some kind of rational conversation with a straight person. Because Arnie and I
did
talk; I remember that, but not what we talked about. I held up my end. I kept my voice normal. I responded. And that ten or twelve minutes seemed to last hours.

I have told you that it is impossible to be objective about that ride; if there was a logical progression of events, it is lost to me now, blocked out. That journey through the cold black night really was like a trip on a boulevard through hell. I can't remember everything that happened, but I can remember more than I want to. We backed out of the driveway and into a mad funhouse world where all the creeps were real.

We went back in time, 1 have said, but did we? The present-day streets of Libertyville were still there, but they were like a thin overlay of film—it was as if the Libertyville of the late 1970s had been drawn on Saran Wrap and laid over a time that was somehow more real, and I could feel that time reaching its dead hands out toward us, trying to catch us and draw us in for ever. Arnie stopped at intersections where we should have had the right-of-way; at others, where traffic lights glowed red, he cruised Christine mildly through without even slowing. On Main Street I saw Shipstad's Jewellery Store and the Strand Theatre, both of them torn down in 1972 to make way for the new Pennsylvania Merchants Bank. The cars parked along the street gathered here and there in clumps where New Year's Eve parties were going on—all seemed to be pre-60s… or pre-1958. Long portholed Buicks. A DeSoto Firelite station wagon with a body-long blue inset that looked like a check-mark. A '57 Dodge Lancer four-door hardtop. Ford Fairlanes with their distinctive tail-lights, each like a big colon lying on its side. Pontiacs in which the grille had not yet been split. Ramblers, Packards, a few bullet-nosed Studebakers, and once, fantastical and new, an Edsel.

"Yeah, this year is going to be better," Arnie said. I glanced over at him. He raised his beercan to his lips, and before it got there, his face had turned to LeBay's a rotting figure from a horror comic. The fingers that held the beer were only bones. I swear to you, they were only bones, and the pants lay nearly flat against the seat, as if there was nothing inside them except broomsticks.

Is it?" I said, breathing the car's foul and choking miasma as shallowly as possible and trying not to choke.

"It is," LeBay said, only now he was Arnie again, and as we paused at a stop sign, I saw a '77 Camaro go ripping past. "All I ask is that you stand by me a little, Dennis. Don't let my mother drag you into this shit. Things are going to turn out." He was LeBay again, grinning fleshlessly and eternally at the idea of things turning out. I felt my brains beginning to totter. Surely I would scream soon.

I dropped my eyes from that terrible half-face and saw what Leigh had seen: dashboard instruments that weren't instruments at all, but luminescent green eyes bulging out at me.

At some point the nightmare ended. We pulled up at the curb in an area of town I didn't even recognize, an area I would have sworn I had never seen before. Tract houses stood dark everywhere, some of them three-quarters finished, some no more than frames. Halfway down the block, lit by Christine's hi-beams, was a sign which read:

MAPLEWAY ESTATES

LIBERTYVILLE REALTORS

SOLE SELLING AGENTS

A Good Place to Raise YOUR Family

Think about it!

"Well, here you go," Arnie said. "Can you make it up the walk yourself, man?"

I looked doubtfully around at this deserted, snow- covered development and then nodded. Better here, on crutches, alone, than in that terrible car. I felt a large plastic smile on my face. "Sure. Thanks."