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‘Christine,’ he said, ‘is what I always called her.’
‘Christine,’ Arnie said. ‘I like it. Don’t you, Dennis?’
Now he was talking about naming the damned thing. It was all getting to be a bit much.
‘What do you think, Dennis, do you like it?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘If you’ve got to name it, Arnie, why don’t you name it Trouble?’
‘Those were the reasons?’
‘Two out of three.’ He looked in my eyes. ‘I’m no fucking crook, Dennis.’
There was a moment of electric communication between us – even now, four years later, I get goosebumps thinking of it, although I’m by no means sure that I can get it across to you. It wasn’t that he treated me like an equal for the first time that night; it wasn’t even that he was showing me the wistful knight-errant still hiding inside the button-down man scrambling for a living in a dirty, hustling world. I think it was sensing him as a reality, a person who had existed long before I ever came onstage, a person who had eaten his share of mud. In that moment I think I could have imagined him making love to my mother, both of them sweaty and working hard to make it, and not have been embarrassed.
What’s now is for ever – ask any Republican banker and he’ll tell you that’s just the way the world ought to run.
Now he lay in bed, needing to sleep but unable. The sleet had thickened and curdled into fat white splats of snow.
It wasn’t right.
Something had been started, something was going on. He couldn’t even lie to himself and say that he didn’t know about it. The car – Christine – several people had commented on how beautifully he had restored her. He had driven it to school and the kids from auto shop were all over it; they were underneath it on crawlers to look at the new exhaust system, the new shocks, the bodywork. They were waist-deep in the engine compartment, checking out the belts and the radiator, which was miraculously free of the corrosion and the green gunk that is the residue of years of antifreeze, checking out the generator and the tight, gleaming pistons socketed in their valves. Even the air cleaner was new, with the numbers 318 painted across the top, raked backward to indicate speed.
Yes, he had become something of a hero to his fellow shoppies, and he had taken all the comments and the compliments with just the right deprecatory grin. But even then, hadn’t the confusion been there, somewhere deep inside? Sure.
Because he couldn’t remember what he had done to Christine and what he hadn’t.
The time spent working on her at Darnell’s was nothing but a blur now, like his ride out to the airport earlier this evening had been. He could remember starting the body-work on the dented rear end, but he couldn’t remember finishing it. He could remember painting the hood – covering the windscreen and mudguards with masking tape and donning the white mask in the paint-shop out back – but exactly when he had replaced the springs he couldn’t remember. Nor could he remember where he had gotten them. All he could remember for sure was sitting behind the wheel for long periods, stupefied with happiness . . . feeling the way he had felt when Leigh whispered ‘I love you’ before slipping in her front door. Sitting there after most of the guys who worked on their cars at Darnell’s had gone home to get their suppers. Sitting there and sometimes turning on the radio to listen to the oldies on WDIL.
Maybe the windscreen was the worst.
He hadn’t bought a new windscreen for Christine, he was sure of that. His bankbook would be dented a lot more than it was if he’d bought one of those fancy wrap jobs. And wouldn’t he have a receipt? He had even hunted for such a receipt once in the desk-file marked CAR STUFF that he kept in his room. But he hadn’t found one, and the truth was, he had hunted rather half-heartedly.
Dennis had said something – that the snarl of cracks had looked smaller, less serious. Then, that day at Hidden Hills, it had just been . . . well, gone. The windscreen had been clean and unflawed.
But when had it happened? How had it happened?
He didn’t know.
The machine zone
And if her own family thought she was hard sometimes, it was because they didn’t understand that when you went through hell you came out baked by the fire. And when you had to burn to have your own way, you always wanted to have it.
He tried to sit up in the bed, hurt his back, and used the control panel to get into what was almost a sitting position. The motor whined. ‘Jesus, it’s really you!’
‘Were you expecting Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster?’ Arnie asked amiably.
‘I was sleeping. I guess I thought I still was.’ Dennis rubbed his forehead hard, as if to get rid of the sleep behind it. ‘Happy Thanksgiving, Arnie.’
‘You bet,’ Arnie said. ‘Same to you. Did they feed you turkey with all the trimmings?’
Conversation lapsed a little, both of them lost in their own thoughts.
At last Dennis said, ‘Leigh came by yesterday. Told me about Christine. I’m sorry, man. Bummer.’
Arnie looked up, and his expression of thoughtful melancholy was lost in a cheerful smile that Dennis didn’t really believe.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It was crude. But I went way overboard about it.’
‘Anyone would,’ Dennis said, aware that he had become suddenly watchful, hating it but unable to help it. The friendship part was over; it had been here, warming the room and filling it, and now it had simply slipped away like the ephemeral, delicate thing it was. Now they were just dancing.
He could hear the car’s engine, suddenly revving up. That horrible, unearthly shrieking of the undercarriage on the cement again. Moochie turned around, panting harshly. Christine was reversing back up the gutter, and as it passed him, he saw. He saw.
There was no one behind the wheel.
The car somewhere behind him revved again, fell off, revved again, fell off, and then the motor began to shriek. The tyres wailed, and Christine shot at Moochie Welch’s back, crossing the lanes of JFK Drive at right angles. Moochie screamed and could not hear himself scream because the car was still peeling rubber, the car was still shrieking like an insanely angry, murderous woman, and that shriek filled the world.
‘Oh shit on you, you whore.’
Sitting in his office and looking out at the garage, eerily silent in the slack time that came every year in the weeks before Christmas, Will thought (not for the first time) that most people would accept anything if they saw it happen right before their very eyes. In a very real sense there was no supernatural, no abnormal; what happened, happened, and that was the end.
He thought of his own high school days, when he had had the lead part in the senior play. His part had been that of the minister who is driven to suicide by his lust for Sadie Thompson, the girl he has set out to save. He had brought down the house. His one moment of glory in a high school career that had been devoid of sporting or academic triumphs, and maybe the high point of his youth – his father had been a drunk, his mother a drudge, his one brother a deadbeat with his own moment of glory coming somewhere in Germany, his only applause the steady pounding of German 88s.
He thought of the smell, the high, rotting stink. Leigh choking, digging at her throat, turning blue. He had tried to thump her on the back because that’s what you did when someone was choking, there was no such thing as a Heimlich Manoeuvre because it hadn’t been invented yet, and besides, that was how it was supposed to end, only not in the car . . . beside the road . . . in his arms . . .
He closed his eyes and the whole world seemed to tilt and swirl sickly.
Leigh had 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.
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.
‘Be careful, Dennis,’ she said. ‘But kill it. It’s really not a she at all – just an it. Kill it.’
It.
The mother and the little girl, Veronica and Rita, were standing in front of the smashed and dented hulk of Christine, hand in hand, their faces solemn and sorrowing.
‘They’re not there,’ I said. ‘And if they are, it’s time they went back’ – more pain in my leg and the world went grey – ‘back to where they belong. Keep your foot on it.’
The dreams aren’t the only reason I’ve set all this down – there’s another, which I’ll tell you in a moment – but I would be lying if I said the dreams weren’t a big part of the reason. Maybe it’s an effort to lance the wound and clean it out. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not rich enough to afford a shrink.
Mood
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