“Yeah. He’s… he’s not acting healthy about it, Dad. Everything’s the car, the car, the car.”
“People who have not had a great deal tend to do that,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a car, sometimes it’s a girl, sometimes it’s a career or a musical instrument or an unhealthy obsession with some famous person. I went to college with a tall, ugly fellow we all called Stork. With Stork it was his model train set… he’d been hooked on model trains ever since the third grade, and his set was pretty damn near the eighth wonder of the world. He flunked out of Brown the second semester of his freshman year. His grades were going to hell, and what it came down to was a choice between college and his Lionels. Stork picked the trains.”
“What happened to him?”
“He killed himself in 1961,” my father said, and stood up “My point is just that good people can sometimes get blinded, and it’s not always their fault. Probably Darnell will forget all about him—he’ll just be another guy tinkering around under his car on a crawlie-gator. But if Darnell tries to use him, you be his eyes, Dennis. Don’t let him get pulled into the dance.”
“All right. I’ll try. But there may not be that much I can do.”
“Yeah. How well I know it. Want to go up?”
“Sure.”
We went up, and, tired as I was, I lay awake a long time. It had been an eventful day. Outside, a night wind tapped a branch softly against the side of the house, and far away, downtown, I heard some kid’s rod peeling rubber—it made a sound in the night like an hysterical woman’s desperate laughter.
14
CHRISTINE AND DARNELL
He said he heard about a couple living in the USA,
He said they traded in their baby for a Chevrolet:
Let’s talk about the future now,
We’ve put the past away…
Between working on the construction project days and working on Christine nights, Arnie hadn’t been seeing much of his folks. Relations there had been getting pretty strained and abrasive. The Cunningham house, which had always been pleasant and low-key in the past, was now an armed camp. It is a state of affairs a lot of people can remember from their teenage years, guess; too many, maybe. The kid is egotistical enough to think he or she is the first person in the world to discover some particular thing (usually it’s a girl, but it doesn’t have to be), and the parents are too scared and stupid and possessive to want to let go of the halter. Sins on both sides. Sometimes it gets painful and outrageous—no war is as dirty and bitter as a civil war. And it was particularly painful in Arnie’s case because the split had come so late, and his folks had gotten much too used to having their own way. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that they had blueprinted his life.
So when Michael and Regina proposed a four-day weekend at their lakeshore cottage in upstate New York before school started again, Arnie said yes even though he badly wanted those last four days to work on Christine. More and more often at work he had told me how he was going to “show them”; he was going to turn Christine into a real street-rod and “show them all”. He had already planned to restore the car to its original bright red and ivory after the bodywork was done.
But he went off with them, determined to yassuh and tug his forelock for the whole four days and have a good time with his folks—or a reasonable facsimile. I got over the evening before they left and was relieved to find they had both absolved me of blame in the affair of Arnie’s car (which they still hadn’t even seen). They had apparently decided it was a private obsession. That was fine by me.
Regina was busy packing. Arnie and Michael and I got their Oldtown canoe on top of their Scout and tied it down. When it was done, Michael suggested to his son—with the air of a powerful king conferring an almost unbelievable favour on two of his favourite subjects—that Arnie go in and get a few beers.
Arnie, affecting both the expression and the tones of amazed gratitude, said that would be super. As he left, he dropped a wink my way.
Michael leaned against the Scout and lit a cigarette. “Is he going to get tired of this car business, Denny?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You want to do me a favour?”
“Sure, if I can,” I said cautiously I was pretty sure he was going to ask me to go to Arnie, act the Dutch uncle part, and try to “talk him out of it”.
But instead he said, “If you get a chance, go down to Darnell’s while we’re gone and see what sort of progress he’s making. I’m interested.”
“Why is that?” I asked, thinking immediately it was a pretty damn rude question—but by then it was already out.
“Because I want him to succeed,” he said simply, and glanced at me. “Oh, Regina’s still dead set against it. If he has a car, that means he’s growing up. And if he’s growing up, that means… all sorts of things,” he finished lamely. “But I’m not so down on it. You couldn’t characterize me as dead set against it anyway, at least not anymore. Oh, he caught me by surprise at first… I had visions of some dead dog sitting out in front of our house until Arnie went off to college—that or him choking to death on the exhaust some night.”
The thought of Veronica LeBay jumped into my head, all unbidden.
“But now…” He shrugged, glanced at the door between the garage and the kitchen, dropped his cigarette, and scuffed it out. “He’s obviously committed. He’s got his sense of self-respect on the line. I’d like to see him at least get it running.”
Maybe he saw something in my face; when he went on he sounded defensive.
“I haven’t quite forgotten everything about being young,” he said. “I know a car is important to a kid Arnie’s age. Regina can’t see that quite so clearly. She always got picked up. She was never faced with the problems of being the picker-upper. I remember that a car is important… if a kid’s ever going to have any dates.”
So that’s where he thought it was at. He saw Christine as a means to an end rather than as the end itself. I wondered what he’d think if I told him that I didn’t think Arnie had ever looked any further than getting the Fury running and legal. I wondered if that would make him more or less uneasy.
The thump of the kitchen door closing.
“Would you go take a look?”
“I guess so,” I said. “If you want.”
“Thanks.”
Arnie came back with the beers. “What’s the thanks for?” he asked Michael. His voice was light and humorous, but his eyes flicked between us carefully. I noticed again that his complexion was really clearing, and his face seemed to have strengthened. For the first time, the two thoughts Arnie and dates didn’t seem mutually exclusive. It occurred to me that his face was almost handsome—not in any jut-jawed lifeguard king-of-the-prom way, but in an interesting, thoughtful way. He would never be Roseanne’s type, but…
“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 gearboxes, 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 tyres and a variety of spinner hubcaps. Looking through the window of Darnell’s speed shop was like looking into a crazy automotive Disneyland.