She didn’t answer; only looked at him. He met her gaze for only a moment, and then his eyes—angry, confused, almost haunted—shifted away.
“Leigh, people forget things. You’re right, I should have used it. But if you had the course, you know you can use it on yourself.” Arnie laced his hands together into a fist with one thumb sticking up and pressed against his diaphragm to demonstrate. “It’s just that in the heat of the moment, people forget—”
“Yes, they do. And you seem to forget a lot of things in that car. Like how to be Arnie Cunningham.”
Arnie was shaking his head. “You need time to think this over, Leigh. You need—”
“That is just what I don’t need!” she said with a fierceness she wouldn’t have believed she still had left in her. “I never had a supernatural experience in my life—I never even believed in stuff like that—but now I wonder just what’s going on and what’s happening to you. They looked like eyes, Arnie. And later… afterward… there was a smell, A horrible, rotten smell.”
He recoiled.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
No. I don’t have the slightest idea.”
“You just jumped as if the devil had twisted your ear.”
“You’re imagining things,” Arnie said hotly. “A lot of things.”
“That smell was there. And there are other things as well. Sometimes your radio won’t get anything but that oldies station—”
Another flicker in his eyes, and a slight twitch at the left corner of his mouth.
“And sometimes when we’re making out it just stalls, as if it didn’t like it. As if the car didn’t like it, Arnie.”
“You’re upset,” he said with ominous flatness.
“Yes, I am upset,” she said, beginning to cry. “Aren’t you?” The tears trickled slowly down her cheeks. I think this is the end of it for us, Arnie—I loved you, but I think it’s over. I really think it is, and that makes me feel so sad, and so sorry. “Your relationship with your parents has turned into a… an armed camp, you’re running God knows what into New York and Vermont for that fat pig Will Darnell, and that car… that car…”
She could not say anything more. Her voice dissolved. She dropped her packages and bent blindly to pick them up. Exhausted and weeping, she succeeded in doing little more than stirring them around. He bent to help her and she pushed at him roughly. “Leave them alone! I’ll get them!”
He stood up, his face pale and set. His expression was one of wooden fury, but his eyes… oh, to Leigh his eyes seemed lost.
“All right,” he said, and now his voice roughened with his own tears. “Good. Join up with the rest of them if you want. You just saddle up and ride right along with all those other shitters. Who gives a tin shit?” He drew in a shivering breath, and a single hurt sob escaped him before he could clap a gloved hand brutally over his mouth.
He began to walk backward toward the car; he reached out blindly behind himself for the Plymouth and Christine was there. “Just as long as you know you’re crazy. Right out of your mind! So go on and play you! I don’t need any of you!”
His voice rose to a thin scream, in devilish harmony with the wind:
“I don’t need you so fuck off!”
He rushed around to the driver’s side, his feet slid and he grabbed for Christine. She was there and he didn’t fall. He got in, the engine revved, the headlights came on in a huge white glare, and the Fury pulled out, rear tyres spinning up a fog of snow.
Now the tears came fast and hard as she stood watching, the tail-lights fade to round red periods and wink out as the car went around the corner. Her packages lay scattered at her feet.
And then, suddenly, her mother was there, absurdly clothed in an open raincoat, green rubber boots, and her blue flannel nightgown.
“Honey, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Leigh sobbed.
“I almost choked to death, I smelled something that might have come from a freshly opened tomb, and I think… yes, I think that somehow that car is alive… more alive every day. I think it’s like some kind of horrible vampire, only it’s taking Arnie’s mind to feed itself. His mind and his spirit.”
“Nothing, nothing’s wrong, I had a fight with Arnie, that’s all. Help me pick up my things, would you?”
They picked up Leigh’s parcels and went in. The door shut behind them and the night belonged to the wind and to the swiftly falling snow. By morning there would be better than eight inches.
Arnie cruised until sometime after midnight, and later had no memory of it. The snow had filled the streets; they were deserted and ghostly. It was not a night for the great American motor-car. Nevertheless, Christine moved through the deepening storm with surefooted ease, even without snow tyres. Now and then the prehistoric shape of a snowplough loomed and was gone.
The radio played. It was WDIL all the way across the dial. The news came on. Eisenhower had predicted, at the AFL–CIO convention, a future of labour and management marching harmoniously into the future together. Dave Beck had denied that the Teamsters Union was a front for the rackets. Rock ’n roller Eddie Cochran had been killed in a car crash while en route to London’s Heathrow Airport: three hours of emergency surgery had failed to save his life. The Russians were rattling their ICBMS. WDIL played the oldies all week long, but on the weekends they really got dedicated. Fifties newscasts, wow. That was
(never heard anything like that before) a really neat idea. That was
(totally insane) pretty neat.
The weather promised more snow.
Then music again: Bobby Darin singing “Splish-Splash”, Ernie K-Doe singing “Mother-in-Law”, the Kalin twins singing “When”. The wipers beat time.
He looked to his right, and Roland D. LeBay was riding shotgun.
Roland D. LeBay sat there in his green pants and a faded shirt of Army twill, looking out of dark eyesockets. A beetle sat, preening, within one.
You have to make them pay, Roland D. LeBay said. You have to make the shitters pay, Cunningham. Every last fucking one of them.
“Yes,” Arnie whispered. Christine hummed through the night, cutting the snow with fresh, sure tracks. “Yes, that’s a fact.” And the wipers nodded back and forth.
35
NOW THIS BRIEF INTERLUDE
Drive that old Chrysler to Mexico, boy.
At Libertyville High, Coach Puffer had given way to Coach Jones, and football had given way to basketball. But nothing really changed: the LHS cagers didn’t do much better than the LHS gridiron warriors—the only bright spot was Lenny Barongg, a three-sport man whose major one was basketball. Lenny stubbornly went about having the great year he needed to get the athletic scholarship to Marquette that he lusted after.
Sandy Galton suddenly blew town. One day he was there, the next he was gone. His mother, a forty-five-year old wino who didn’t look a day over sixty, did not seem terribly concerned. Neither did his younger brother, who pushed more dope than any other kid in Gornick Junior High. A romantic rumour that he had cut out for Mexico made the rounds at Libertyville High. Another, less romantic, rumour also made the rounds: that Buddy Repperton had been on Sandy about something and he felt it would be safer to make himself scarce.
The Christmas break approached and the school’s atmosphere grew restless and rather thundery, as it always did before a long vacation. The student body’s overall grade average took its customary pre-Christmas dip. Book reports were turned in late and often bore a suspicious resemblance to jacket copy (after all, how many sophomore English students are apt to call The Catcher in the Rye “this burning classic of postwar adolescence”?). Class projects were left half done or undone, the percentage of detention periods given for kissing and petting in the halls skyrocketed, and busts for marijuana went way up as the Libertyville High School students indulged in a little pre-Christmas cheer. So a good many of the students were up; teacher absenteeism was up; in the hallways and homerooms, Christmas decorations were up.