Michael, who had had a speedometer cable or two break on him in his time, glanced at the needle for the characteristic jitter that indicated trouble there. But the needle hung dead still just above forty. The speedometer seemed fine; it was only the milometer that had gotten funky. And did Arnie really believe that the speedometer and milometer ran off the same cables? Surely not.
He laughed and said, “That’s weird, son.”
“Why the airport?” Arnie asked.
“I’m going to treat you to a thirty-day parking stub,” Michael said. “Five dollars. Cheaper than Darnell’s garage. And you can get your car out whenever you want it. The airport’s a regular stop on the bus run. End of the line, in fact.”
“Holy Christ, that’s the craziest thing I ever heard!” Arnie shouted. He pulled into the turnaround drive of a darkened dry cleaner’s shop. “I’m to take the bus twenty miles out to the airport to get my car when I need it? It’s like something out of Catch-22! No! No way!”
He was about to say something more, when he was suddenly grabbed by the neck.
“You listen,” Michael said. “I’m your father, so you listen to me. Your mother was right, Arnie. You’ve gotten unreasonable—more than unreasonable—in the last couple of months. You’ve gotten downright peculiar.”
“Let go of me,” Arnie said, struggling in his father’s grip.
Michael didn’t let go, but he loosened up. “I’ll put it in perspective for you,” he said. “Yes, the airport is a long way to come, but the same quarter that would take you to Darnell’s will take you out here. There are parking garages closer in, but there are more incidents of theft and vandalism in the city. The airport is, by contrast, quite safe.”
“No public parking lot is safe.”
“Second, it’s cheaper than a downtown garage and much cheaper than Darnell’s.”
“That’s not the point, and you know it!”
“Maybe you’re right,” Michael said. “But you’re missing something too, Arnie. You’re missing the real point.”
“Well suppose you tell me what the real point is.”
“All right. I will.” Michael paused for a moment, looking steadily at his son. When he spoke his voice was low and even, almost as musical as his recorder. “Along with any sense of what is reasonable, you seem to have totally lost your sense of perspective. You’re almost eighteen, in your last year at public school. I think you’ve made up your mind not to go to Horlicks; I’ve seen the college brochures you’ve brought home—”
“No, I’m not going to Horlicks,” Arnie said. He sounded a little calmer now. “Not after all of this. You have no idea how badly I want to get away. Or maybe you do.”
“Yes. I do. And maybe that’s best. Better than this constant abrasion between you and your mother. All I ask is that you not tell her yet; wait until you have to submit the application papers.”
Arnie shrugged, promising nothing either way.
“You’ll be taking your car to school, that is if it’s still running—”
“It’ll be running.”
“—and if it’s a school that allows freshmen to have cars on campus.”
Arnie turned toward his father, surprised out of his smouldering anger—surprised and uneasy. This was a possibility he had never considered.
“I won’t go to a school that says I can’t have my wheels,” he said. His tone was one of patient instruction, the sort of voice an instructor with a class of mentally retarded children might use.
“You see?” Michael asked. “She’s right. Basing your choice of a college on the school’s policy concerning freshmen and cars is totally irrational. You’ve gotten obsessed with this car.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
Michael pressed his lips together for a moment.
“Anyway, what’s running out to the airport on the bus to pick up your car, if you want to take Leigh out? It’s an inconvenience, granted, but not really a major one. It means you won’t use it unless you have to, for one thing, and you’ll save gas money. Your mother can have her little victory, she won’t have to look at it.” Michael paused and then smiled his sad grin again. “She doesn’t see it as money flying away, both of us know that. She sees it as your first decisive step away from her… from us, I guess she… oh, shit, I don’t know.”
He stopped, looking at his son. Arnie looked back thoughtfully.
“Take it to college with you; even if you choose a campus that doesn’t allow freshmen to have cars on campus, there are ways to get around—”
“Like parking it at the airport?”
“Yes. Like that. When you come home for weekends, Regina will be so glad to see you she’ll never mention the car. Hell, she’ll probably get out there in the driveway and help you wash it and Turtlewax it just so she can find out what you’re doing. Ten months. Then it’ll be over. We can have peace in the family again. Go on, Arnie. Drive.”
Arnie pulled out of the dry cleaner’s and back into traffic.
“Is this thing insured?” Michael asked abruptly.
Arnie laughed. “Are you kidding? If you don’t have liability insurance in this state and you get in an accident, the cops kill you. Without liability, it’d be your fault even if the other car fell out of the sky and landed on top of you. It’s one of the ways the shitters keep kids off the roads in Pennsylvania.”
Michael thought of telling Arnie that a disproportionate number of fatal accidents in Pennsylvania—41 per cent—involved teenage drivers (Regina had read the statistic to him as part of a Sunday supplement article, rolling that figure out in slow, apocalyptic tones: “For-ty one per cent!” shortly after Arnie bought his car), and decided it wasn’t anything Arnie would want to hear… not in his present mood.
“Just liability?”
They were passing under a reflecting sign which read LEFT LANE FOR AIRPORT. Arnie put on his blinker and changed lanes. Michael seemed to relax a little.
“You can’t get collision insurance until you’re twenty-one. I mean that; those shitting insurance companies are all as rich as Croesus, but they won’t cover you unless the odds are stacked outrageously in their favour.” There was a bitter, somehow weakly peevish note in Arnie’s voice that Michael had never heard there before, and although he said nothing, he was startled and a little dismayed by his son’s choice of words—he had assumed Arnie used that sort of language with his peers (or so he later told Dennis Guilder, apparently totally unaware of the fact that, up until his senior year, Arnie had really had no peers except for Guilder), but he had never used it in front of Regina and himself.
“Your driving record and whether or not you had driver ed don’t have anything to do with it,” Arnie went on. “The reason you can’t get collision is because their fucking actuarial tables say you can’t get collision. You can get it at twenty-one only if you’re willing to spend a fortune—usually the premiums end up being more than the car books for until you’re twenty-three or so, unless you’re married. Oh, the shitters have got it all figured out. They know how to walk it right to you, all right.”
Up ahead the airport lights glowed, runways outlined in mystic parallels of blue light. “If anyone ever asks me what the lowest form of human life is, I’ll tell them it’s an insurance agent.”
“You’ve made quite a study of it,” Michael commented. He didn’t quite dare to say anything else; Arnie seemed only waiting to fly into a fresh rage.
“I went around to five different companies. In spite of what Mom said, I’m not anxious to throw my money away.”
“And straight liability was the best you could do?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Six hundred and fifty dollars a year.”
Michael whistled.
“That’s right,” Arnie agreed.
Another twinkling sign, advising that the two left-hand lanes were for parking, the right lanes for departures. At the entrance to the parking lot, the way split again. To the right was an automated gate where you took a ticket for short-term parking. To the left was the glass booth where the parking-lot attendant sat, watching a small black-and-white TV and smoking a cigarette.