I said, “At least get him to start it for you, Arnie. And get the hood up. There’s a puddle of oil underneath. I think the block might be cracked. I really think—”
“Can you loan me the nine?” His eyes were fixed on mine. I gave up. I took out my wallet and gave him the nine dollars.
“Thanks, Dennis,” he said.
“Your funeral, man.”
He took no notice. He put my nine with his sixteen and went back to where LeBay stood by the car. He handed the money over and LeBay counted it carefully, wetting his thumb.
“I’ll only hold it for twenty-four hours, you understand,” LeBay said.
“Yessir, that’ll be fine,” Arnie said.
“I’ll just go in the house and write you out a receipt,” he said. “What did you say your name was, soldier?”
Arnie smiled a little. “Cunningham. Arnold Cunningham.”
LeBay grunted and walked across his unhealthy lawn to his back door. The outer door was one of those funky aluminium combination doors with a scrolled letter in the centre—a big L in this case.
The door slammed behind him.
“The guy’s weird, Arnie. The guy is really fucking w—”
But Arnie wasn’t there. He was sitting behind the wheel of the car. That same sappy expression was on his face.
I went around to the front and found the hood release. I pulled it, and the hood went up with a rusty scream that made me think of the sound effects you hear on some of those haunted-house records. Flecks of metal sifted down. The battery was an old Allstate, and the terminals were so glooped up with green corrosion that you couldn’t tell which was positive and which was negative. I pulled the air cleaner and looked glumly into a four-barrel carb as black as a mineshaft.
I lowered the hood and went back to where Arnie was sitting, running his hand along the edge of the dashboard over the speedometer, which was calibrated up to an utterly absurd 120 miles per hour. Had cars ever really gone that fast?
“Arnie, I think the engine block’s cracked. I really do. This car is lunch, my friend. It’s just total lunch. If you want wheels, we can find you something a lot better than this for two-fifty. I mean it. A lot better.”
“It’s twenty years old,” he said. “Do you realize a car is officially an antique when it’s twenty years old?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The junkyard behind Darnell’s is full of official antiques, you know what I mean?”
“Dennis—”
The door banged. LeBay was coming back. it was just as well; further discussion would have been meaningless, I may not be the world’s most sensitive human being, but when the signals are strong enough, I can pick them up. This was something Arnie felt he had to have, and I wasn’t going to talk him out of it. I didn’t think anyone was going to talk him out of it.
LeBay handed him the receipt with a flourish. Written on a plain sheet of notepaper in an old man’s spidery and slightly trembling script was: Received from Arnold Cunningham, $25.00 as a 24-hr deposit on 1958 Plymouth, Christine. And below that he had signed his name.
“What’s this Christine?” I asked, thinking I might have misread it or he might have misspelled it.
His lips tightened and his shoulders went up a little, as if he expected to be laughed at… or as if he were daring me to laugh at him. “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?”
He looked hurt at that, but I was beyond caring. I went back to my car to wait for him, wishing I had taken a different route home.
2
THE FIRST ARGUMENT
Just tell your hoodlum friends outside,
You ain’t got time to take a ride! (yakety-yak!)
Don’t talk back!
I drove Arnie to his house and went in with him to have a piece of cake and a glass of milk before going home. It was a decision I repented very quickly.
Arnie lived on Laurel Street, which is in a quiet residential neighbourhood on the west side of Libertyville. As far as that goes, most of Libertyville is quiet and residential. It isn’t ritzy, like the neighbouring suburb of Fox Chapel (where most of the homes are estates like the ones you used to see every week on Columbo), but it isn’t like Monroeville, either, with its miles of malls, discount tyre warehouses, and dirty book emporiums. There isn’t any heavy industry—it’s mostly a bedroom community for the nearby universitv. Not ritzv, but sort of brainy, at least.
Arnie had been quiet and contemplative all the way home; I tried to draw him out, but he wouldn’t be drawn, I asked him what he was going to do with the car. “Fix it up,” he said absently, and lapsed back into silence.
Well, he had the ability; I wasn’t questioning that. He was good with tools, he could listen, he could isolate. His hands were sensitive and quick with machinery; it was only when he was around other people, particularly girls, that they got clumsy and restless, wanting to crack knuckles or jam themselves in his pockets, or, worst of all, wander up to his face and run over the scorched-earth landscape of his cheeks and chin and forehead, drawing attention to it.
He could fix the car up, but the money he had earned that summer was earmarked for college. He had never owned a car before, and I didn’t think he had any idea of the sinister way that old cars can suck money. They suck it the way a vampire is supposed to suck blood. He could avoid labour costs in most cases by doing the work himself, but the parts alone would half-buck him to death before he was through.
I said some of these things to him, but they just rolled off. His eyes were still distant, dreaming. I could not have told you what he was thinking.
Both Michael and Regina Cunningham were at home she was working one of an endless series of goofy jigsaw puzzles (this one was about six thousand different cogs and gears on a plain white background; it would have driven me out of my skull in about fifteen minutes), and he was playing his recorder in the living room.
It didn’t take long for me to start wishing I had skipped the cake and milk. Arnie told them what he had done, showed them the receipt, and they both promptly went through the roof.
You have to understand that Michael and Regina were University people to the core. They were into doing good, and to them that meant being into protest. They had protested in favour of integration in the early ’60s, had moved on to Vietnam, and when that gave out there was Nixon, questions of racial balance in the schools (they could quote you chapter and verse on the Ralph Bakke case until you fell asleep), police brutality, and parental brutality. Then there was the talk—all the talk. They were almost as much into talking as they were into protesting. They were ready to take part in an all-night bull-session on the space programme or a teach-in on the ERA or a seminar on possible alternatives to fossil fuels at the drop of an opinion. They had done time on God alone knew how many “hotlines”—rape hotlines, drug hotlines, hotlines where runaway kids could talk to a friend, and good old DIAL HELP, where people thinking about suicide could call up and listen to a sympathetic voice say don’t do it, buddy, you have a social commitment to Spaceship Earth. Twenty or thirty years of university teaching and you’re prepared to run your gums the way Pavlov’s dogs were prepared to salivate when the bell rang. I guess you can even get to like it.