The car somewhere behind him revved again, fell off, revved again, fell off, and then the motor began to shriek. The tyres wailed, and Christine shot at Moochie Welch’s back, crossing the lanes of JFK Drive at right angles. Moochie screamed and could not hear himself scream because the car was still peeling rubber, the car was still shrieking like an insanely angry, murderous woman, and that shriek filled the world.
His shadow was no longer chasing him. It was leading him and getting longer. In the window of the dry-cleaning shop he saw great yellow eyes blossom.
It wasn’t even close.
At the very last moment Moochie tried to jig left, but Christine jigged with him as if she had read his final desperate thought. The Plymouth hit him squarely, still accelerating, breaking Moochie Welch’s back and knocking him spang out of his engineer’s boots. He was thrown forty feet into the brick siding of the little market, again narrowly missing a plunge through a plate-glass window.
The force of his strike was hard enough to cause him to rebound into the street again, leaving a splash of blood on the brick like an inkblot. A picture of it would appear the next day on the front page of the Libertyville Journal-Standard.
Christine reversed, screeched to a skidding, sliding stop, and roared forward again. Moochie lay near the curbing, trying to get up. He couldn’t get up. Nothing seemed to work. All the signals were scrambled.
Bright white light washed over him.
“No,” he whispered through a mouthful of broken teeth. “N—”
The car roared forward and over him. Change flew everywhere. Mooche was pulled and rolled first one way and then the other as Christine reversed into the street again. She stood there, engine revving and falling off to a rich idle, then revving again. She stood there as if thinking.
Then she came at him again. She hit him, jumped the curb, skidded around, and then reversed again, thumping back down.
She screamed forward.
And back.
And forward.
Her headlights glared. Her exhaust pipes jetted hot blue smoke.
The thing in the street no longer looked like a human being; it looked like a scattered bundle of rags.
The car reversed a final time, skidded around in a half-circle, and accelerated, roaring over the bleeding bundle in the street again and going down the Drive, the blast of its engine, still winding up to full rev, rocketing off the walls of the sleeping buildings—but not entirely sleeping now; lights were beginning to flick on, people who lived over their stores were going to their windows to see what all the racket had been about, and if there had been an accident.
One of Christine’s headlights had been shattered. Another flickered unsteadily off and on, bleared with a thin wash of Moochie’s blood. The grille had been bent inward, and the dents in it approximated the shape and size of Moochie’s torso with all the gruesome perfection of a deathmask. Blood was splashed across the hood in fans that spread out as windspeed increased. The exhaust had taken on a heavy, blatting sound; one of Christine’s two silencers had been destroyed.
Inside, on the instrument panel, the milometer continued to run backward, as if Christine were somehow slipping back into time, leaving not only the scene of the hit-and-run behind but the actual fact of the hit-and-run.
The silencer was the first thing.
Suddenly that heavy, blatting sound diminished and smoothed out.
The fans of blood on the hood began to run toward the front of the car again in spite of the wind—as if a movie film had been reversed.
The flickering headlight suddenly shone steadily, and a tenth of a mile later the deadlight became a headlight again. With an unimportant tinkling sound—no more than the sound of a small boy’s boot breaking the thin scum of ice on a mudpuddle—the glass reassembled itself from nowhere.
There was a hollow punk! punk! punk! sound from the front end, the sound of denting metal, the sound you sometimes get when you squeeze a beer-can. But instead of denting, Christine’s grille was popping back out—a bodyshop veteran with fifty years’ experience in putting fender-benders right could not have done it more neatly.
Christine turned onto Hampton Street even before the first of those awakened by the screaming of her tyres had reached Moochie’s remains. The blood was gone. It had reached the front of the hood and disappeared. The scratches were gone. As she rolled quietly toward the garage door with its HONK FOR ENTRY sign, there was one final punk! as the last dimple—this one in the left front bumper, the spot where Christine had struck Moochie’s calf—popped back out.
Christine looked like new.
The car stopped in front of the large garage door in the middle of the darkened, silent building. There was a small plastic box clipped to the driver’s side sun-visor. This was a little doodad Will Darnell had given Arnie when Arnie began to run cigarettes and booze over into New York State for him—it was, perhaps, Darnell’s version of a gold key to the crapper.
In the still air the door-opener hummed briefly, and the garage door rattled obediently up. Another circuit was made by the rising door, and a few interior rights came on, burning weakly.
The headlight knob on the dashboard suddenly went in, and Christine’s duals went out. She rolled inside and whispered across the oil-stained concrete to stall twenty. Behind her, the overhead door, which had been set on a thirty-second timer, rolled back down. The light circuit was broken, and the garage was dark again.
In Christine’s ignition switch, the keys dangling down suddenly turned to the left. The engine died. The leather patch with the initials R.D.L. branded into it swung back and forth in decreasing arcs and was finally still.
Christine sat in the dark, and the only sound in Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage was the slow tick of her cooling engine.
31
THE DAY AFTER
I got a ’69 Chevy with a 396,
Feully heads and a Hurst on the floor,
She’s waitin tonight
Down in the parking-lot
Outside the 7–11 store…
Arnie Cunningham did not go to school the next day. He said he thought he might be coming down with the flu. But that evening he told his parents that he felt enough improved to go down to Darnell’s and do some work on Christine.
Regina protested—although she did not come right out and say so, she thought Arnie looked like death warmed over. His face was now entirely free of acne and blemishes, but there was a trade-off: it was much too pale, and there were dark circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t been sleeping. In addition, he was still limping. She wondered uneasily if her son could be using some sort of drug, if perhaps he had hurt his back worse than he had let on and had started taking pills so he could go on working on the goddamned car. Then she dismissed the thought. Obsessed as he might be with the car, Arnie could not be that stupid.
“I’m really fine, Mom,” he said.
“You don’t look fine. And you hardly touched your supper.”
“I’ll get some chow later on.”
“How’s your back? You’re not lifting a lot of heavy stuff down there, are you?”
“No, Mom.” This was a lie. And his back had hurt terribly all day long. This was the worst it had been since the original injury at Philly Plains (oh, was that where it started? His mind whispered, oh really? Are you sure?). He had taken the brace off for a while, and his back had throbbed fit to kill him. He had put it on again after only fifteen minutes, cinching it tighter than ever. Now his back really was a little better. And he knew why. He was going to her. That was why.
Regina looked at him, worried and at a loss. For the first time in her life she simply did not know how to proceed. Arnie was beyond her control now. Knowing it brought on a horrible feeling of despair that sometimes crept up on her and filled her brain with an awful, empty, rotten coldness. At these times a depression so total she could barely credit it would steal through her, making her wonder exactly what it was she had lived her life for—so her son could fall in love with a girl and a car all in the same terrible fall? Was that it? So she could see exactly how hateful to him she had become when she looked in his grey eyes? Was that it? And it really didn’t have anything to do with the girl at all, did it? No. In her mind, it always came back to the car. Her rest had become broken and uneasy, and for the first time since her miscarriage nearly twenty years before, she had found herself considering making an appointment with Dr Mascia to see if he would give her some pill for the stress and the depression and the attendant insomnia. She thought about Arnie on her long sleepless nights, and about mistakes that could never be rectified; she thought about how time had a way of swinging the balance of power on its axis, and how old age had a way of sometimes looking through a dressing-table mirror like the hand of a corpse poking through eroded earth.