Leigh laughed, and the wind flipped her hair out behind her. The temperature had moderated from last night’s bitter mid-teens, but it was still chilly. She was glad. Without a certain chill in the air, it didn’t feel like Christmas shopping. Bad enough the decorations in Pittsburgh wouldn’t be up yet. But it wasn’t bad; it was good. And suddenly she was glad about everything, most of all glad to be alive. And in love.
She had thought about it, the way she loved him. She had had crushes before, and once, in Massachusetts, she had thought she might be in love, but about this boy there was simply no question. He troubled her sometimes—his interest in the car seemed almost obsessive—but even her occasional unease played a part in her feelings, which were richer than anything she had ever known. And part of it, she admitted to herself, was of course selfish—she had, in weeks only, begun to make him over… to complete him.
They cut between the cars, headed for the thirty-day section of the parking lot. Overhead, a USAir jet was coming in on its final approach, the thunder of its engines rolling away in great flat waves of sound. Arnie was saying something, but the plane obliterated his voice altogether after the first few words—something about Thanksgiving dinner—and she turned to look at his face, secretly amused by his silently moving mouth,
Then, quite suddenly, his mouth stopped moving. He stopped walking, His eyes opened wider… and then seemed to bulge. His mouth began to twist, and the hand holding Leigh’s suddenly clamped down ruthlessly, grinding her fingerbones painfully together.
“Arnie—”
The jet-roar was fading, but he seemed not to have heard. His hand clamped tighter. His mouth had slammed shut now, and it was knotted into an awful grimace of surprise and terror. She thought, He’s having a heart attack… stroke… something.
“Arnie, what’s wrong?” she cried. “Arnie… ooowwwhoww, that hurts!”
For one unbearable moment the pressure on the hand he had been holding so lightly and lovingly just before increased until it seemed that the bones would actually splinter and break. The high colour in his cheeks was gone, and his skin was as leaden as a slate headstone.
He said one word—“Christine!”— and suddenly let go of her. He ran, thumping his leg against the bumper of a Cadillac, spinning away, almost falling, catching himself, and running forward again.
She realized at last it was something about the car—the ear, the car, always it was the goddam car—and a bitter anger rose in her that was both total and despairing. For the first time she wondered if it would be possible to love him; if Arnie would allow it.
Her anger was quenched the instant she really looked… and saw.
Arnie ran to what remained of his car, hands out, and stopped so abruptly in front of it that the gesture seemed almost to be a horrified warding-off; the classic movie pose of the hit-and-run victim an instant before the lethal collision.
He stood that way for a moment, as if to stop the car, or the whole world. Then he lowered his arms. His adam’s apple lurched up and down twice as he struggled to swallow something back—a moan, a cry—and then his throat seemed to lock solid, every muscle standing out, each cord standing out, even the blood-vessels standing out in perfect relief. It was the throat of a man trying to lift a piano.
Leigh walked slowly toward him. Her hand still throbbed, and tomorrow it would be swollen and virtually useless, but for now she had forgotten it. Her heart went out to him and seemed to find him; she felt his sorrow and shared it or it seemed to her that she did. It was only later that she realized how much Arnie shut her out that day—how much of his suffering he elected to do alone, and how much of his hate he hid away.
“Arnie, who did it?” she asked, her voice breaking with grief for him. No, she had not liked the car, but to see it reduced to this made her understand fully what Arnie’s commitment had been, and she could hate it no longer—or so she thought.
Arnie made no answer. He stood looking at Christine, his eyes burning, his head slightly down.
The windscreen had been smashed through in two places; handfuls of safety glass fragments were strewn across the slashed seat covers like trumpery diamonds. Half of the front bumper had been pried off and now dragged on the pavement, near a snarl of black wires like octopus tentacles. Three of the four side windows had also been broken. Holes had been punched through the sides of the body at waist-level in ragged, wavering lines. It looked as if some sharp, heavy instrument—maybe the pry-end of a tyre iron—had been used. The passenger door hung open, and she saw that all the dashboard glass had been broken. Tufts and wads of stuffing were everywhere. The speedometer needle lay on the driver’s side floormat.
Arnie walked slowly around his car, noting all of this. Leigh spoke to him twice. He didn’t answer either time. Now the leaden colour of his face was broken by two hectic, burning spots of flush riding high up on his cheekbones. He picked up the octopus-thing that a been lying on the pavement and she saw it was a distributor cap—her father had pointed that out to her once when he had been tinkering with their car.
He looked at it for a moment, as if examining an exotic zoological specimen, and then threw it down. Broken glass gritted under their heels. She spoke to him again. He didn’t answer, and now, as well as a terrible pity for him, she began to feel afraid, too. She told Dennis Guilder later that it seemed—at least at the time—perfectly possible that he might have lost his mind.
He booted a piece of chrome trim out of his way. It struck the cyclone fence at the back of the lot with a little tinkling sound. The tail-lights had been smashed, more trumpery gems, this time rubies, this time on the pavement instead of the seat.
“Arnie—” she tried again.
He stopped. He was looking in through the hole in the driver’s side window. A terrible low sound began to come from his chest, a jungle sound. She looked over his shoulder, saw, and suddenly felt a crazy need to laugh and scream and faint all at the same time. On the dashboard… she hadn’t noticed at first; in the midst of the general destruction she hadn’t noticed what was on the dashboard. And she wondered, with vomit suddenly rising in her throat, who could be so low, so completely low, as to do such a thing, to…
“Shitters!” Arnie cried, and his voice was not his own. It was high and shrill and cracked with fury.
Leigh turned around and threw up, holding blindly onto the car next to Christine, seeing small white dots in front of her eyes that expanded like puffed rice. Dimly she thought of the county fair—every year they’d haul an old junk car up onto a plank platform and lean a sledgehammer against it and you got three swings for a quarter. The idea was to demolish the car. But not… not to…
“You goddam shitters!” Arnie screamed. “I’ll get you! I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I do! If it’s the last motherfucking thing I ever do!”
Leigh threw up again and for one terrible moment found herself wishing that she had never ever met Arnie Cunningham.
27
ARNIE AND REGINA
Would you like to go riding
In my Buick ’59? I said, would you like to go riding
In my Buick ’59? It’s got two carburettors
And a supercharger up the side.
He let himself into the house that night at quarter of twelve. The clothes he had been wearing with the shopping trip to Pittsburgh in mind were grease- and sweat-stained. His hands were more deeply grimed, and a shallow cut corkscrewed across the back of the left like a brand. His face looked haggard and stunned. There were dark circles under his eyes.