He stood on the walk, looking at his stalled car, marvellously resurrected time traveller from the era of Buddy Holly and Khrushchev and Laika the Space Dog, and suddenly he hated it. It had done something to him, he wasn’t sure what. Something.
The dash lights, blurred into football-shaped red eyes by the moisture on the window, seemed to mock him and reproach him at the same time.
He opened the driver’s side door, slipped behind the wheel, and pulled the door shut again. He closed his eyes. Peace flowed over him and things seemed to come back together. He had lied to her, yes, but it was a little lie. A mostly unimportant lie. No—a completely unimportant lie.
He reached out without opening his eyes and touched the leather rectangle the keys were attached to—old and scuffed, the initials R.D.L. burned into it. He had seen no need to get a new keyring, or a piece of leather with his own initials on it.
But there was something peculiar about the leather tab the keys were attached to, wasn’t there? Yes. Quite peculiar indeed.
When he had counted out the cash on LeBay’s kitchen table and LeBay had skittered the keys across the red-and-white-checked oilcloth to him, the rectangle of leather had been scuffed and nicked and darkened by age, the initials almost obliterated by time and the constant friction of rubbing against the change in the old man’s pocket and the material of the pocket itself.
Now the initials stood out fresh and clear again. They had been renewed.
But, like the lie, that was really unimportant. Sitting inside the metal shell of Christine’s body, he felt very strongly that that was true.
He knew it. Quite unimportant, all of it.
He turned the key. The starter whined, but for a long time the engine wouldn’t catch. Wet wires. Of course that was what it was.
“Please,” he whispered. “It’s all right, don’t worry, everything is the same.”
The engine fired, missed. The starter whined on and on. Sleet ticked coldly on the glass. It was safe in here; it was dry and warm. If the engine would start.
“Come on,” Arnie whispered. “Come on, Christine. Come on, hon.”
The engine fired again, caught. The dash lights flickered and went out. The IGN light pulsed weakly again as the motor stuttered, then went out for good as the beat of the engine smoothed out into a clean hum.
The heater blew warm air gently around his legs, negating the winter chill outside.
It seemed to him that there were things Leigh could not understand, things she could never understand. Because she hadn’t been around. The pimples. The cries of Hey Pizza-Face! The wanting to speak, the wanting to reach out to other people, and the inability. The impotence. It seemed to him that she couldn’t understand the simple fact that, had it not been for Christine, he never would have had the courage to call her on the phone even if she had gone around with I WANT TO DATE ARNIE CUNNINGHAM tattooed on her forehead. She couldn’t understand that he sometimes felt thirty years older than his age—no! more like fifty! and not a boy at all but some terribly hurt veteran back from an undeclared war.
He caressed the steering wheel. The green cats’ eyes of the dash instruments glowed back at him comfortingly.
“Okay,” he said. Almost sighed.
He dropped the gearshift into big D and flicked on the radio. Dee Dee Sharp singing “Mashed Potato Time”; mystic nonsense on the radio waves coming out of the dark.
He pulled out, planning to head for the airport, where he would park his car and catch the bus that ran back to town on the hour. And he did that, but not in time to take the 11:00 p.m. bus as he had intended. He took the midnight bus instead, and it was not until he was in bed that night recalling Leigh’s warm kisses instead of the way Christine wouldn’t fire up, that it occurred to him that somewhere that evening, after leaving the Cabot house and before arriving at the airport, he had lost an hour. It was so obvious that he felt like a man who has turned the house upside down looking for a vital bit of correspondence, only to discover that he has been holding it in his other hand all along. Obvious… and a little scary.
Where had he been?
He had a blurry memory of drawing away from the kerb in front of Leigh’s and then just…
… just cruising.
Yeah. Cruising. That was all. No big deal.
Cruising through the thickening sleet, cruising empty streets that were plated with the stuff, cruising without snow tyres (and yet Christine, incredibly surefooted, never missed her way or skidded around a corner, Christine seemed to find the safe and secure way as if by magic, the ride as solid as it would have been if the car had been on trolley-tracks), cruising with the radio on, spilling out a constant stream of oldies that seemed to consist solely of girls” names: Peggy Sue, Carol, Barbara-Ann, Susie Darlin”.
It seemed to him that at some point he had gotten a little frightened and had punched one of the chrome buttons on the converter he’d installed, but instead of FM-104 and the Block Party Weekend he got WDIL all over again, only now the disc jockey sounded crazily like Alan Freed, and the voice that followed was that of Screamin” Jay Hawkins, hoarse and chanting: “I put a spell on youuu… because you’re miiiiiine…”
And then at last there had been the airport with its foul-weather lights pulsing sequentially like a visible heartbeat. Whatever had been on the radio faded to a meaningless jumble of static and he had turned it off. Getting out of the car he had felt a sweaty, incomprehensible sort of relief.
Now he lay in bed, needing to sleep but unable, The sleet had thickened and curdled into fat white splats of snow.
It wasn’t right.
Something had been started, something was going on. He couldn’t even lie to himself and say that he didn’t know about it. The car—Christine—several people had commented on how beautifully he had restored her. He had driven it to school and the kids from auto shop were all over it; they were underneath it on crawlers to look at the new exhaust system, the new shocks, the bodywork. They were waist-deep in the engine compartment, checking out the belts and the radiator, which was miraculously free of the corrosion and the green gunk that is the residue of years of antifreeze, checking out the generator and the tight, gleaming pistons socketed in their valves. Even the air cleaner was new, with the numbers 318 painted across-the top, raked backward to indicate speed.
Yes, he had become something of a hero to his fellow shoppies, and he had taken all the comments and the compliments with just the night deprecatory grin. But even then, hadn’t the confusion been there, somewhere deep inside? Sure.
Because he couldn’t remember what he had done to Christine and what he hadn’t.
The time spent working on her at Darnell’s was nothing but a blur now, like his ride out to the airport earlier this evening had been. He could remember starting the bodywork on the dented rear end, but he couldn’t remember finishing it. He could remember painting the hood—covering the windscreen and mudguards with masking tape and donning the white mask in the paint-shop out back—but exactly when he had replaced the springs he couldn’t remember. Nor could he remember where he had gotten them. All he could remember for sure was sitting behind the wheel for long periods, stupefied with happiness… feeling the way he had felt when Leigh whispered “I love you” before slipping in her front door. Sitting there after most of the guys who worked on their cars at Darnell’s had gone home to get their suppers. Sitting there and sometimes turning on the radio to listen to the oldies on WDIL.
Maybe the windscreen was the worst.
He hadn’t bought a new windscreen for Christine, he was sure of that. His bankbook would be dented a lot more than it was if he’d bought one of those fancy wrap jobs. And wouldn’t he have a receipt? He had even hunted for such a receipt once in the desk-file marked CAR STUFF that he kept in his room. But he hadn’t found one, and the truth was, he had hunted rather halfheartedly.