21
ARNIE AND MICHAEL
Ever since you’ve been gone
I walk around with sunglasses on
But I know I will be just fine
As long as I can make my jet black Caddy shine.
Michael caught Arnie in the driveway, headed for Christine. He put a hand on Arnie’s shoulder. Arnie shook it off and went on digging for his car-keys.
“Arnie. Please.”
Arnie turned around fast. For a moment he seemed on the verge of making that evening’s blackness total by striking his father. Then some of the tenseness in his body subsided and he leaned back against the car, touching it with his left hand, stroking it, seeming to draw strength from it.
“All right,” he said. “What do you want?”
Michael opened his mouth and then seemed unsure how to proceed. An expression of helplessness—it would have been funny if it hadn’t been so grimly awful—spread over his face. He seemed to have aged, to have gone grey and haggard around the edges.
“Arnie,” he said, seeming to force the words out against some great weight of opposing inertia, “Arnie, I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah,” Arnie said, and turned away again, opening the driver’s side door. A pleasant smell of well-cared-for car drifted out. “I could see that from the way you stood up for me.”
“Please,” he said. “This is hard for me. Harder than you know.”
Something in his voice made Arnie turn back. His father’s eyes were desperate and unhappy.
“I didn’t say I wanted to stand up for you,” Michael said. “I see her side as well, you know. I see the way you pushed her, determined to have your own way at any cost—”
Arnie uttered a harsh laugh. “Just like her, in other words.”
“Your mother is going through the change of life,” Michael said quietly. “It’s been extremely difficult for her.”
Arnie blinked at him, at first not even sure what he had heard. It was as if his father had suddenly said something to him in igpay atinlay; it seemed to have no more relevance to what they were talking about than baseball scores.
“W-What?”
“The change. She’s frightened, and she’s drinking too much, and sometimes she’s in physical pain. Not often,” he said, seeing the alarmed look on Arnie’s face, “and she’s been to the doctor, and the change is all it is. But she’s in an emotional uproar. You’re her only child, and the way she is now, all she can see is that she wants things to be right for you, no matter what the cost.”
“She wants things her way. And that isn’t anything new. She’s always wanted things her way.”
“That she thinks the right thing for you is whatever she thinks the right thing is goes without saying,” Michael said. “But what makes you think you are so different? Or better? You were after her ass in there, and she knew it. So did I.”
“She started it—”
“No, you started it when you brought the car home. You knew how she felt. And she’s right about another thing. You’ve changed. From the first day you came home with Dennis and said you’d bought a car; that’s when it started. Do you think that hasn’t upset her? Or me? To have your kid start exhibiting personality traits you didn’t even know existed?”
“Hey, Dad, come on! That’s a little—”
“We never see you, you’re always working on your car or out with Leigh.”
“You’re starting to sound just like her.”
Michael suddenly grinned—but it was a sad grin “You’re wrong about that. Just as wrong as you can be. She sounds like her, and you sound like her, but I just sound like the guy in charge of some dumb UN peacekeeping force that’s about to get its collective ass shot off.”
Arnie slumped a little; his hand found the car again and began caressing, caressing.
“All right,” he said. “I guess I see what you mean. I don’t know why you want to let her push you around like that, but okay.”
The sad, humiliated grin remained, a little like the grin of a dog that has chased a woodchuck a long time on a hot summer day. “Maybe some things get to be a way of life. And maybe there are compensations that you can’t understand and I can’t explain. Like… well, I love her, you know.”
Arnie shrugged. “So… what now?”
“Can we go for a ride?”
Arnie looked surprised, then pleased. “Sure. Hop in. Any place in particular?”
“The airport.”
Arnie’s eyebrows went up. “The airport? Why?”
“I’ll tell you as we go.”
“What about Regina?”
“Your mother’s gone to bed,” Michael said quietly, and Arnie had the good grace to flush a little himself.
Arnie drove firmly and well. Christine’s new sealed-beam headlights cut the early dark in a clean, deep tunnel of light. He passed the Guilders’ house, then turned left onto Elm Street at the stop sign and started out toward JFK Drive. I-376 took them to I-278 and then out toward the airport. Traffic was light. The engine muttered softly through new pipes. The dashboard instrument panel glowed a mystic green.
Arnie turned on the radio and found WDIL, the AM station from Pittsburgh that plays only oldies. Gene Chandler was chanting “The Duke of Earl”.
“This thing runs like a dream,” Michael Cunningham said. He sounded awed.
“Thanks,” Arnie said, smiling.
Michael inhaled. “It smells new.”
“A lot of it is. These seat covers set me back eighty bucks. Part of the money Regina was bitching about. I went to the library and got a lot of books and tried to copy everything the best I could. But it hasn’t been as easy as people might think.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, the ’58 Plymouth Fury wasn’t anybody’s idea of a classic car, so no one wrote much about it, even in the car retrospective volumes—American Car, American Classics, Cars of the 1950s, things like that. The ’58 Pontiac was a classic, only the second year Pontiac made the Bonneville model; and the ’58 T-Bird with the rabbit-ear fins, that was the last really great Thunderbird, I think; and—”
“I had no idea you knew so much about old cars,” Michael said. “How long have you been harbouring this interest, Arnie?”
He shrugged vaguely. “Anyway, the other problem was just that LeBay himself customized the original Detroit rolling stock—Plymouth didn’t offer a Fury in, red and white, for one thing—and I’ve been trying to restore the car more the way he had it than the way Detroit meant it to be. So I’ve just been sort of flying by the seat of my pants.”
“Why do you want to restore it the way LeBay had it?”
That vague shrug again. “I don’t know. It just seems like the right thing to do.”
“Well, I think you’re doing a hell of a job.”
“Thank you.”
His father leaned toward him, looking at the instrument panel.
“What are you looking at?” Arnie asked, a little sharply.
“I’ll be damned,” Michael said. “I’ve never seen that before.”
“What? Arnie glanced down. “Oh. The milometer.”
“It’s running backward, isn’t it?”
The milometer was indeed running backward; at that time, on the evening of November 1, it read 79,500 and some odd miles. As Michael watched, the tenths-of-a-mile indicator rolled from 2 to. 1 to 0. As it went back to.9, the actual miles slipped back by one.
Michael laughed. “That’s one thing you missed, son.”
Arnie smiled—a small smile. “That’s right,” he said. “Will says there’s a wire crossed in there someplace. I don’t think I’ll fool with it. It’s sort of neat, having a milometer that runs backward.”
“Is it accurate?”
“Huh?”
“Well, if you go from our house to Station Square, would it subtract five miles from the total?”
“Oh,” Arnie said. “I get you. No, it’s not accurate at all. Turns back two or three miles for every actual mile travelled. Sometimes more. Sooner or later the speedometer cable will break, and when I replace that, it’ll take care of itself.”