Arnie came back to himself suddenly, scared and wide-eyed, breathing hard. What had been happening to him? He had seemed like someone else there for a moment, someone on a crazed rant against humanity in general Not just someone. It was LeBay.
No! That’s not true at all!
Leigh’s voice: Isn’t that the truth of it, Arnie?
Suddenly something very like a vision rose in his tired, confused mind. He was hearing a minister’s voice: Arnold, do you take this woman to be your loving—
But it wasn’t a church; it was a used-car lot with bright multicoloured plastic pennants fluttering in a stiff breeze. Camp chairs had been set up. It was Will Darnell’s lot, and Will was standing beside him in the best man’s position. There was no girl beside him. Christine was parked beside him, shining in a spring sun, even her whitewalls seeming to glow.
His father’s voice: Is there something going on?
The preacher’s voice: Who giveth this woman to this man?
Roland D. LeBay rose from one of the camp chairs like the prow of a skeletal ghost-ship from Hades. He was grinning—and for the first time Arnie saw who had been sitting around him: Buddy Repperton, Richie Trelawney, Moochie Welch. Richie Trelawney was black and charred, most of his hair burned off. Blood had poured down Buddy Repperton’s chin and had caked his shirt like hideous vomit. But Moochie Welch was the worst; Moochie Welch had been ripped open like a laundry bag. They were smiling. All of them were smiling.
I do, Roland D. LeBay croaked. He grinned, and a tongue slimed with graveyard mould lolled from the stinking hole of his mouth. I give her, and he’s got the receipt to prove it. She’s all his. The bitch is the ace of spades… and she’s all his.
Arnie became aware that he was moaning in the telephone booth, clutching the receiver against his chest. With a tremendous effort he pulled himself all the way out of the daze—vision, whatever it had been—and got hold of himself.
This time when he reached for the change on the ledge, he spilled half of it onto the floor. He plugged a dime into the slot and scrabbled through the telephone book until he found the hospital number. Dennis. Dennis would be there, Dennis always had been. Dennis wouldn’t let him down. Dennis would help.
The switchboard girl answered, and Arnie said, “Room Two-forty, please.”
The connection was made. The phone began to ring It rang… and rang… and rang. Just as he was about to give up, a brisk female voice said, “Second floor, C-Wing, who were you trying to reach?”
“Guilder,” Arnie said. “Dennis Guilder.”
“Mr Guilder’s in Physical Therapy right now, the female voice said. “You could reach him at eight o’clock.”
Arnie thought of telling her it was important—very important—but suddenly he was overwhelmed with a need to get out of the phone booth. Claustrophobia was like a giant’s hand pushing down on his chest. He could smell his own sweat. The smell was sour, bitter.
“Sir?”
“Yeah, okay, I’ll call back,” Arnie said. He broke the connection and nearly burst out of the booth, leaving his change scattered on the ledge and the floor. A few people turned around to look at him, mildly interested, and then turned back to their food again.
“Pizza’s ready,” the counterman said.
Arnie glanced up at the clock and saw he had been in the booth for almost twenty minutes. There was sweat all over his face. His armpits felt like a jungle. His legs were trembling—the muscles in his thighs felt as if they might simply give out and spill him onto the floor.
He paid for the pizza, nearly dropping his wallet as he tucked his three dollars in change back in.
“You okay?” the counterman asked. “You look a little white around the gills.”
“I’m fine,” Arnie said. Now he felt as if he might vomit. He snatched the pizza in its white box with the word GINO’s emblazoned across the top and fled into the cold sharp clarity of the night. The last of the clouds had blown away, and the stars twinkled like chipped diamonds. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking first at the stars and then at Christine, parked across the street, waiting faithfully.
She would never argue or complain, Arnie thought. She would never demand. You could enter her anytime and rest on her plush upholstery, rest in her warmth. She would never deny. She—she—
She loved him.
Yes; he sensed that was true. Just as he sometimes sensed that LeBay would not have sold her to anyone else, not for two hundred and fifty, not for two thousand. She had been sitting there waiting for the right buyer. One who would…
One who would love her for herself alone, that voice inside whispered.
“Yes. That was it; that was exactly it.
Arnie stood there with his pizza forgotten in his hands, white steam rising lazily from the grease-spotted box. He looked at Christine, and such a confusing whirl of emotions ran through him that there might have been a cyclone in his body, rearranging everything it did not simply destroy. Oh, he loved and loathed her, he hated her and cherished her, he needed her and needed to run from her, she was his and he was hers and
(I now pronounce you man and wife joined and sealed from this day forth for ever and ever, until death do you part)
But worst of all was the horror, the terrible numbing horror, the realization that… that…
(how did you hurt your back that night, Arnie? after Repperton—the late Clarence “Buddy” Repperton—and his buddies trashed her? How did you hurt your back so that now you have to wear this stinking brace all the time? How did you hurt your back?)
The answer rose and Arnie began to run, trying to beat the realization, to get to Christine before he saw the whole thing plain and went mad.
He ran for Christine, running his tangled emotions and some terrible drawing realization a foot race; he ran to her the way a hype runs for his works when the shakes and the jitters get so bad he can no longer think of anything but relief; he ran the way that the damned run to their appointed doom; he ran as a bridegroom runs to the place where his bride stands waiting.
He ran because inside Christine none of these things mattered—not his mother, father, Leigh, Dennis, or what he had done to his back that night when everyone was gone, that night after he had taken his almost totally destroyed Plymouth from the airport and back to Darnell’s, and after the place was empty he had put Christine’s transmission in neutral and pushed her, pushed her until she began to roll on her flat tyres, pushed her until she was out the door and he could hear the wind of November keening sharply around the wrecks and the abandonded hulks with their stellated glass and their ruptured gas tanks; he had pushed her until the sweat ran off him in rivers and his heart thudded like a runaway horse in his chest and his back cried out for mercy; he had pushed her, his body pumping as if in some hellish consummation; he had pushed her, and inside the milometer ran slowly backward, and some fifty feet beyond the door his back began to really throb, and he kept pushing, and then his back began to scream in protest, and he kept pushing, muscling it along on the flat, slashed tyres, his hands going numb, his back screaming, screaming, screaming. And then—
He reached Christine and flung himself inside, shuddering and panting. His pizza fell on the floor. He picked it up and set it on the seat, feeling calm slowly wash through him like a soothing balm. He touched the steering wheel, let his hands slip down it, tracing its delicious curve. He took one glove off and felt in his pocket for his keys. For LeBay’s keys.