Buddy, whose usual demeanour during these late-night bull-sessions was one of sullen withdrawal, tipped his cheap contour-plastic chair abruptly back down on all four legs and put his bottle of Driver down on the windscreen-wiper cabinet with a bang.
“What did you say?” he asked. “Cunningham? Ole Cuntface?”
“Yeah,” Sandy said, surprised and a little uneasy. “That’s him.”
“You sure? The guy who got me kicked out of school?” Sandy looked at him with mounting alarm. “Yeah. Why?”
“And he’s got a thirty-day ticket, which means he’s parked in the long-term lot?”
“Yeah. Maybe his folks didn’t want him to have it at…”
Sandy trailed off. Buddy Repperton had begun to smile. It was not a pleasant sight, that smile, and not only because the teeth it revealed were already going rotten. It was as if, somewhere, some terrible machinery had just whined into life and was beginning to cycle up and up to full running speed.
Buddy looked around from Sandy to Don to Moochie Welch to Richie Trelawney. They looked back at him, interested and a little scared.
“Cuntface,” he said in a soft, marvelling voice. “Ole Cuntface got his machine street-legal and his funky folks have got him parking it out at the airport.”
He laughed.
Moochie and Don exchanged a glance that was somehow both uneasy and eager.
Buddy leaned toward them, elbows on the knees of his jeans.
“Listen,” he said.
23
ARNIE AND LEIGH
Ridin along in my automobile,
My baby beside me at the wheel,
I stole a kiss at the turn of a mile,
My curiosity running wild—
Cruisin and playin the radio,
With no particular place to go.
WDIL was on the car radio and Dion was singing “Run-around Sue” in his tough, streetwise voice, but neither of them was listening.
His hand had slipped up under the T-shirt she was wearing and had found the soft glory of her breasts, capped with nipples that were tight and hard with excitement. Her breath came in short, steep gasps. And for the first time her hand had gone where he wanted it, where he needed it, into his lap, where it pressed and turned and moved, without experience but with enough desire to make up for the lack.
He kissed her and her mouth opened wide, her tongue was there, and the kiss was like inhaling the clean aroma/taste of a rain forest. He could feel excitement and arousal coming off her like a glow.
He leaned toward her, strained toward her, all of him, and for a moment he could feel her respond with a pure, clean passion.
Then she was gone.
Arnie sat there, dazed and stupefied, a little to the right of the steering wheel, as Christine’s dome-tight came on. It was brief; the passenger door clunked solidly shut and the light clicked off again.
He sat a moment longer, not sure what had happened, momentarily not even sure of where he was. His body was in a complete stew—a helter-skelter array of emotions and erratic physical reactions that were half wonderful and half terrible. His glands hurt; his penis was hard iron; his balls throbbed dully. He could feel adrenalin whipping rapidly through his bloodstream, up and down and all around.
He made a fist and brought it down on his leg, hard. Then he slid across the seat, opened the door, and went after her.
Leigh was standing on the very edge of the Embankment, looking down into the darkness. Within a bright rectangle in the middle of that darkness, Sylvester Stallone strode across the night in the costume of a young labour leader from the 1930s. Again Arnie had that feeling of living in some marvellous dream that might at any moment skew off into nightmare… perhaps it had already begun to happen.
She was too close to the edge—he took her arm and pulled her gently backward. The ground up here was dry and crumbly. There was no fence or guardrail. If the earth at the edge let go, Leigh would be gone; she would land somewhere in the suburban development loosely scattered around the Liberty Hill Drive-In.
The Embankment had been the local lovers” lane since time out of mind. It was at the end of Stanson Road, a long, meandering stretch of two-lane blacktop that first curved out of town and then hooked back toward it, dead-ending on Libertyville Heights, where there had once been a farm.
It was November 4, and the rain that had begun earlier that Saturday night had turned to a light sleet. They had the Embankment and the free (if silent) view of the drive-in to themselves. He got her back into the car—she came willingly enough—thinking it was sleet on her cheeks. It was only inside, by the ghostly green glow of the dashboard lights, that he saw for sure she was crying.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head and cried harder.
“Did I… was it something you didn’t want to do?” He swallowed and made himself say it. “Touch me like that?”
She shook her head again, but he wasn’t sure what that meant. Arnie held her, clumsy and worried. And in the back of his mind he was thinking about the sleet, the trip back down, and the fact that he had no snow tyres on Christine as yet.
“I never did that for any boy,” she said against his shoulder. “That’s the first time I ever touched… you know. I did it because I wanted to. Because I wanted to, that’s all.”
“Then what is it?”
“I can’t… here.” The words came out slowly and painfully, one at a time, with an almost awful reluctance.
“The Embankment?” Arnie said, gazing around, thinking stupidly that maybe she thought he had really brought them up here so they would watch F.I.S.T free.
“In this car!” she shouted at him suddenly. “I can’t make love to you in this car!”
“Huh?” He stared at her, thunderstruck. “What are you talking about? Why not?”
“Because, because… I don’t know!” She struggled to say something else and then burst into fresh tears. Arnie held her again until she quieted.
“It’s just that I don’t know which you love more,” Leigh said when she was able.
“That’s…” Arnie paused, shook his head, smiled. “Leigh, that’s crazy.”
“Is it?” she asked, searching his face. “Which of us do you spend more time with? Me… or her?”
“You mean Christine?” He looked around him, smiling that puzzled smile that she could find either lovely and lovable or horridly hateful—sometimes both at once.
“Yes,” she said tonelessly. “I do.” She looked down at her hands, lying lifelessly on her blue woollen slacks. “I suppose it’s stupid.”
“I spend a lot more time with you,” Arnie said. He shook his head. “This is crazy. Or maybe it’s normal—maybe it just seems crazy to me because I never had a girl before.” He reached out and touched the fall of her hair where it spilled over one shoulder of her open coat. The T-shirt beneath read GIVE ME LIBERTYVILLE OR GIVE ME DEATH, and her nipples poked at the thin cotton cloth in a sexy way that made Arnie feel a little delirious.
“I thought girls were supposed to be jealous of other girls. Not cars.”
Leigh laughed shortly. “You’re right. It must be because you’ve never had a girl before. Cars are girls. Didn’t you know that?”
“Oh, come, on—”
“Then why don’t you call this Christopher?” And she suddenly slammed her open palm down on the seat, hard. Arnie winced.
“Come on, Leigh. Don’t.”
“Don’t like me slapping your girl?” she asked with sudden and unexpected venom. Then she saw the hurt look in his eyes. “Arnie, I’m sorry.”
“Are you?” he asked, looking at her expressionlessly. “Seems like nobody likes my car these days—you, my dad and mom, even Dennis. I worked my ass off on it, and it means zero to everybody.”
“It means something to me,” she said softly. “The effort it took.”
“Yeah,” he said morosely. The passion, the heat, had fled. He felt cold and a little sick to his stomach. “Look, we better get going. I don’t have any snow tyres. Your folks’d think it was cute, us going bowling and then getting racked up on Stanson Road.”