Arnie sighed. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe this is the best solution all the way around.”
“Of course it is,” Michael said, relieved. Arnie sounded more like his old self now, and that hard light had died out of his eyes at last. “Ten months, that’s all.”
“Sure.”
He drove up to the booth, and the attendant, a young guy in a black-and-orange high school sweater with the Libertyville logo on the pockets, pushed back the glass partition and leaned out. “Help ya?”
“I’d like a thirty-day ticket,” Arnie said, digging for his wallet.
Michael put his hand over Arnie’s. “This one’s my treat,” he said.
Arnie pushed his hand away gently but firmly and took his wallet out. “It’s my car,” he said. “I’ll pay my own way.”
“I only wanted—” Michael began.
“I know,” Arnie said. “But I mean it.”
Michael sighed. “I know you do. You and you mother. Everything will be fine if you do it my way.”
Arnie’s lips tightened momentarily, and then he smiled. “Well… yeah,” he said.
They looked at each other and both burst out laughing.
At the instant that they did, Christine stalled. Up until then the engine had been ticking over with unobtrusive perfection. Now it just quit; the oil and amp dash lamps came on.
Michael raised his eyebrows. “Say what?”
“I don’t know,” Arnie answered, frowning. “It never did that before.”
He turned the key, and the engine started at once.
“Nothing, I guess,” Michael said.
“I’ll want to check the timing later in the week,” Arnie muttered. He gunned the engine and listened carefully. And in that instant, Michael thought that Arnie didn’t look like his son at all. He looked like someone else, someone much older and harder. He felt a brief but extremely nasty lance of fear in his chest.
“Hey, do you want this ticket or are you just gonna sit there all night talkin about your timing?” the parking-lot attendant asked. He looked vaguely familiar to Arnie, the way people do when you’ve seen them moving around in the corridors at school but don’t have anything else to do with them.
“Oh yeah. Sorry.” Arnie passed him a five-dollar bill, and the attendant gave him a time-ticket.
“Back of the lot,” the attendant said. “Be sure to revalidate it five days before the end of the month if you want the same space again.”
“Right.”
Arnie drove to the back of the lot, Christine’s shadow growing and shrinking as they passed under the hooded arc-sodium lights. He found a vacant space and backed Christine in. As he turned off the key, he grimaced and put a hand to his lower back.
“That still bothering you?” Michael asked.
“Only a little,” Arnie said. “I was almost over it, and it came back on me yesterday. I must have lifted something wrong. Don’t forget to lock your door.”
They got out and locked up. Once out of the car, Michael felt better—he felt closer to his son, and, maybe just as important, he felt less that he had played the impotent fool with his jingling cap of bells in the argument that had taken place earlier. Once out of the car, he felt as if he might have salvaged something—maybe a lot—out of the night.
“Let’s see how fast that bus really is,” Arnie said, and they began to walk across the parking lot toward the terminal, companionably close together.
Michael had formed an opinion of Christine on the ride out to the airport. He was impressed with the job of restoration Arnie had done, but he disliked the car itself disliked it intensely. He supposed it was ridiculous to hold such feelings about an inanimate object, but the dislike was there all the same, big and unmistakable, like a lump in the throat.
The source of the dislike was impossible to isolate. It had caused bitter trouble in the family, and he supposed that was the real reason… but it wasn’t all. He hadn’t liked the way Arnie seemed when he was behind the wheeclass="underline" somehow arrogant and petulant at the same time, like a weak king. The impotent way he had railed about the insurance… his use of that ugly and striking word “shitters”… even the way the car had stalled when they laughed together.
And it had a smell. You didn’t notice it right away, but it was there. Not the smell of new seat covers, that was quite pleasant; this was an undersmell, bitter, almost (but not quite) secret. It was an old smell. Well, Michael told himself, the car is old, why in God’s name do you expect it to smell new? And that made undeniable sense. In spite of the really fantastic job Arnie had done of restoring it, the Fury was twenty years old. That bitter, mouldy smell might be coming from old carpeting in the boot, or old matting under the new floormats; perhaps it was coming from the original padding under the bright new seat covers. Just a smell of age.
And yet that undersmell, low and vaguely sickening, bothered him. It seemed to come and go in waves, sometimes very noticeable, at other times completely undetectable. It seemed to have no specific source. At its worst, it smelled like the rotting corpse of some small animal—a cat, a woodchuck, maybe a squirrel—that had gotten into the boot—or maybe crawled up into the frame and then died there.
Michael was proud of what his son had accomplished… and very glad to get out of his son’s car.
22
SANDY
First I walked past the Stop and Shop
Then I drove past the Stop and Shop.
I liked that much better when I drove past the Stop and Shop,
Cause I had the radio on.
The parking-lot-attendant that night—every night from six until ten, as a matter of fact—was a young man named Sandy Galton, the only one of Buddy Repperton’s close circle of hoodlum friends who had not been in the smoking area on the day Repperton had been expelled from school. Arnie didn’t recognize him, but Galton recognized Arnie.
Buddy Repperton, out of school and with no interest in initiating the procedures that might have gotten him readmitted at the beginning of the spring semester in January, had gone to work at the gas station run by Don Vandenberg’s father. In the few weeks he had been there, he had already begun a number of fairly typical scams—shortchanging gas customers who looked as if they might be in too big a hurry to count the bills he gave back to them, running the remould game (which consists of charging the customer for a new tyre and then actually putting on a remould and pocketing the fifteen- to sixty-dollar difference), running the similar used-parts game, plus selling inspection stickers to kids from the high school and nearby Horlicks—kids desperate to keep their death-traps on the road.
The station was open twenty-four hours a day, and Buddy worked the late shift, from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. Around eleven o’clock, Moochie Welch and Sandy Galton were apt to drop by in Sandy’s old dented Mustang; Richie Trelawney might come by in his Firebird; and Don, of course, was in and out almost all the time—when he wasn’t goofing off at school. By midnight on any given weekend there might be six or eight guys sitting around in the office, drinking beer out of dirty teacups, passing around a bottle of Buddy’s Texas Driver, doing a joint or maybe a little hash, farting, telling dirty jokes, swapping lies about how much pussy they were getting, and maybe helping Buddy fiddle around with whatever was up on the lift.
During one of these late-night gatherings in early November, Sandy happened to mention that Arnie Cunningham was parking his machine in the long-term lot out at the airport. He had, in fact, bought a thirty-day ticket.