Christine Page 10

  Arnie himself answered. "Hello?"

  "Arnie, it's Dennis."

  "Oh. Dennis."

  His voice was so odd and flat that I got a little scared. "Arnie? Are you all right?"

  "Huh? Sure. I thought you were taking Roseanne to the movies."

  "That's where I'm calling from."

  "It must not be that exciting," Arnie said. His voice was still flat--flat and dreary.

  "Roseanne thinks it's great."

  I thought that would get a laugh out of him, but there was only a patient, waiting silence.

  "Listen," I said, "I thought of the answer."

  "Answer?"

  "Sure," I said. "LeBay. LeBay's the answer."

  "Le--" he said in a strange, high voice . . . and then there was more silence. I was starting to get more than a little scared. I'd never known him to be quite this way.

  "Sure," I babbled. "LeBay. LeBay's got a garage, and I got the idea that he'd eat a dead-rat sandwich if the profit margin looked high enough. If you were to approach him on the basis of, say, sixteen or seventeen bucks a week--"

  "Very funny, Dennis." His voice was cold and hateful.

  "Arnie, what--"

  He hung up.

  I stood there, looking at the phone, wondering what the hell it was about. Some new move from his parents? Or had he maybe gone back to Darnell's and found some new damage to his car? Or--

  A sudden intuition--almost a certainty--struck me. I put the telephone back in its cradle and walked over to the concession stand and asked if they had today's paper. The candy-and-popcorn girl finally fished it out and then stood there snapping her gum while I thumbed to the back, where they print the obituaries. I guess she wanted to make sure I wasn't going to perform some weird perversion on it, or maybe eat it.

  There was nothing at all--or so I thought at first. Then I turned the page and saw the headline, LIBERTYVILLE VETERAN DIES AT 71. There was a picture of Roland D. LeBay in his Army uniform, looking twenty years younger and considerably more bright-eyed than he had on the occasions Arnie and I had seen him. The obit was brief. LeBay had died suddenly on Saturday afternoon. He was survived by a brother, George, and a sister, Marcia. Funeral services were scheduled for Tuesday at two.

  Suddenly.

  In the obits, it's always "after a long illness," "after a short illness," or "suddenly." Suddenly can mean anything from a brain embolism to electrocuting yourself in the bathtub. I remembered something I had done to Ellie when she was hardly more than a baby--three, maybe. I scared the bejesus out of her with a Jack-in-the-box. There was the little handle going around in big brother Dennis's hand, making music. Not bad. Kind of fun. And than--ka-BONZO! Out comes this guy with a grinning face and an ugly hooked nose, almost hitting her in the eye. Ellie went off bawling to find her mother and I sat there, looking glumly at Jack as he nodded back and forth, knowing I was probably going to get hollered at, knowing that I probably deserved to get hollered at--I had known it was going to scare her, coming out of the music like that, all at once, with an ugly bang.

  Coming out so suddenly.

  I gave the paper back and stood there, looking blankly at the posters advertising NEXT ATTRACTION and COMING SOON.

  Saturday afternoon.

  Suddenly.

  Funny how things sometimes worked out. My brainstorm had been that maybe Arnie could take Christine back where she had come from; maybe he could pay LeBay for space. Now it turned out that LeBay was dead. He had died, as a matter of fact, on the same day that Arnie had gotten into it with Buddy Repperton--the same day Buddy had smashed Christine's headlight.

  All at once I had an irrational picture of Buddy Repperton swinging that jackhandle--and at the exact same moment, LeBay's eye gushes blood, he keels over, and suddenly, very suddenly . . .

  Cut the shit, Dennis, I lectured. Just cut the--

  And then, somewhere deep in my mind, somewhere near the center, a voice whispered Come on, big guy, let's cruise--and then fell still.

  The girl behind the counter popped her gum and said, "You're missing the end of the picture. Ending's the best part."

  "Yeah, thanks."

  I started back toward the door of the theater and then detoured to the drinking fountain. My throat was very dry.

  Before I'd finished getting my drink, the doors opened and people came streaming out. Beyond and above their bobbing heads, I could see the credit-roll. Then Roseanne came out, looking around for me. She caught many appreciative glances and fielded them cleanly in that dreamy, composed way of hers.

  "Den-Den," she said, taking my arm. Being called Den-Den isn't the worst thing in the world--having your eyes put out with a hot poker or having a leg amputated with a chainsaw is probably worse--but I've never really dug it all that much. "Where were you? You missed the ending. Ending's--"

  "--the best part," I finished with her. "Sorry. I just had this call of nature. It came on very suddenly."

  "I'll tell you all about it if you take me up to the Embankment for a while," she said, pressing my arm against the soft sideswell of her breast. "If you want to talk, that is."

  "Did it have a happy ending?"

  She smiled up at me, her eyes wide and sweet and a little dazed, as they always were. She held my arm even more tightly against her breast.

  "Very happy," she said. "I like happy endings, don't you, Den-Den?"

  "Love them," I said. I should maybe have been thinking about the promise of her breast, but instead I found myself thinking about Arnie.

  That night I had a dream again, only in this one Christine was old-no, not just old; she was ancient, a terrible hulk of a car, something you'd expect to see in a Tarot deck: instead of the Hanged Man, the Death Car. Something you could almost believe was as old as the pyramids. The engine roared and missed and jetted filthy blue oil-smoke.

  It wasn't empty. Roland D. LeBay was lolling behind the wheel. His eyes were open but they were glazed and dead. Each time the engine revved and Christine's rust-eaten body vibrated, he flopped like a rag-doll. His peeling skull nodded back and forth.

  Then the tires screamed their terrible scream, the Plymouth lunged out of the garage at me, and as it did the rust melted away, the old, bleary glass clarified, the chrome winked with savage newness, and the old, balding tires suddenly bloomed into plump new Wide Ovals, each tread seemingly as deep as the Grand Canyon.

  It screamed at me, headlights glaring white circles of hate, and as I raised my hands in a stupid, useless, warding-off gesture, I thought, God, its unending fury--

  I woke up.

  I didn't scream. That night I kept the scream in my throat. Just barely.

  I sat up in my bed, a cold puddle of moonlight caught in a lapful of sheet, and I thought, Died suddenly.

  That night I didn't get back to sleep so quickly.

  11 / The Funeral

  Eldorado fins, whitewalls and skirts,

  Rides just like a little bit of heaven here on earth,

  Well buddy when I die throw my body in the back

  And drive me to the junkyard in my Cadillac.

  --Bruce Springsteen

  Brad Jeffries, our road-crew foreman, was in his mid-forties, balding, stocky, permanently sunburned. He liked to holler a lot--particularly when we were behind schedule--but was a decent enough man. I went to see him during our coffee break to find out if Arnie had asked for part or all of the afternoon off.

  "He asked for two hours so he could go to a buryin," Brad said. He took off his steel-rimmed glasses and massaged the red spots they had left on the sides of his nose. "Now don't you ask--I'm losing you both at the end of the week anyway, and all the jerk-offs are staying."

  "Brad, I have to ask."

  "Why? Who is this guy? Cunningham said he sold him a car, that's all. Christ, I didn't think anyone went to a used car salesman's funeral, except for his family."

  "It wasn't a used car salesman, it was just a guy. Arnie's having some problems about this, Brad. I feel like I ought
to go with him."

  Brad sighed.

  "Okay. Okay, okay, okay. You can have one to three, just like him.

  If you'll agree to work through your lunch hour and stay on till six Thursday night."

  "Sure. Thanks, Brad."

  "I'll punch you out just like regular," Brad said. "And if anybody at Penn-DOT in Pittsburgh finds out about this, my ass is going to be grass."

  "They won't."

  "Gonna be sorry to lose you guys," he said. He picked up the paper and shook it out to the sports. Coming from Brad, that was high praise.

  "It's been a good summer for us, too."

  "I'm glad you feel that way, Dennis. Now get out of here and let me read the paper."

  I did.

  At one o'clock I caught a ride up to the main construction shed on a grader. Arnie was inside, hanging up his yellow hardhat and putting on a clean shirt. He looked at me, startled.

  "Dennis! What are you doing here?"

  "Getting ready to go to a funeral," I said. "Same as you."

  "No," he said immediately, and it was more that word than anything else--the Saturdays he was no longer there, the coolness of Michael and Regina over the phone, the way he had been when I called him from the movies--that made me realize how much he had shut me out of his life, and how it had happened in just the same way LeBay had died. Suddenly.

  "Yes," I said. "Arnie, I dream about the guy. You hear me talking to you? I dream about him. I'm going. We can go separately or together, but I'm going."

  "You weren't joking, were you?"

  "Huh?"

  "When you called me on the phone from that theater. You really didn't know he was dead."

  "Jesus Christ! You think I'd joke about something like that?"

  "No," he said, but not right away. He didn't say no until he'd thought it over carefully. He saw the possibility of all hands being turned against him now. Will Darnell had done that to him, and Buddy Repperton, and I suppose his mother and father too. But it wasn't just them, or even principally them, because none of them was the first cause. It was the car.

  "You dream about him."

  "Yes."

  He stood there with his clean shirt in his hands, musing over that.

  "The paper said Libertyville Heights Cemetery," I said finally. "You going to take the bus or ride with me?"

  "I'll ride with you."

  "Good deal."

  We stood on a hill above the graveside service, neither daring nor wanting to go down and join the handful of mourners. There were less than a dozen of them all told, half of them old guys in uniforms that looked old and carefully preserved--you could almost smell the mothballs. LeBay's casket was on runners over the grave. There was a flag on it. The preacher's words drifted up to us on a hot late-August breeze: man is like the grass which grows and then is cut down, man is like a flower which blooms in the spring and fades in the summer, man is in love, and loves what passes.

  When the service ended, the flag was removed and a man who looked to be in his sixties threw a handful of earth onto the coffin. Little particles trickled off and fell into the hole beneath. The obit had said he was survived by a brother and a sister. This had to be the brother; the resemblance wasn't overwhelming, but it was there. The sister evidently hadn't made it; there was no one but the boys down there around that hole in the ground.

  Two of the American Legion types folded the flag into a cocked hat, and one of them handed it to LeBay's brother. The preacher asked the Lord to bless them and keep them, to make His face shine upon them, to lift them up and give them peace. They started to drift away. I looked around for Arnie and Arnie wasn't beside me anymore. He had gone a little distance away. He was standing under a tree. There were tears on his cheeks.

  "You okay, Arnie?" I asked. It occurred to me that I sure as hell hadn't seen any tears down there, and if Roland D. LeBay had known that Arnie Cunningham was going to be the only person to shed a tear for him at his small-time graveside ceremonies in one of western Pennsylvania's lesser-known boneyards, he might have knocked fifty bucks off the price of his shitty car. After all, Arnie still would have been paying a hundred and fifty more than it was worth.

  He skidded the heels of his hands up the sides of his face in a gesture that was nearly savage. "Fine," he said hoarsely. "Come on."

  "Sure."

  I thought he meant it was time to go, but he didn't start back toward where I'd parked my Duster; he started down the hill instead. I started to ask him where he was going and then shut my mouth. I knew well enough; he wanted to talk to LeBay's brother.

  The brother was standing with two of the Legionnaire types, talking quietly, the flag under his arm. He was dressed in the suit of a man who is approaching retirement on a questionable income; it was a blue pinstripe with a slightly shiny seat. His tie was wrinkled at the bottom, and his white shirt had a yellowish tinge at the collar.

  He glanced around at us.

  "Pardon me," Arnie said, "but you're Mr. LeBay's brother, aren't you?"

  "Yes, I am." He looked at Arnie questioningly and, I thought, a little warily.

  Arnie put out his hand. "My name is Arnold Cunningham. I knew your brother slightly. I bought a car from him a short while ago."

  When Arnie put his hand out, LeBay had automatically reached for it--with American men, the only gesture which may be more ingrained than the handshake response is checking your fly to make sure it's zipped after you come out of a public restroom. But when Arnie went on to say he had bought a car from LeBay, the hand hesitated on its course. For a moment I thought the man was not going to shake after all, that he would pull back and just leave Arnie's hand floating out there in the ozone.

  But he didn't do that . . . at least, not quite. He gave Arnie's hand a single token squeeze and then dropped it.

  "Christine," he said in a dry voice. Yes, the family resemblance was there--in the way the brow shelved over the eyes, the set of the jaw, the light blue eyes. But this man's face was softer, almost kind; I did not think he was ever going to have the lean and vulpine aspect that had been Roland D. LeBay's. "The last note I got from Rollie said he'd sold her."

  Good Christ, he was using that damned female pronoun, too. And Rollie! It was hard to imagine LeBay, with his peeling skull and his pestiferous back brace, as anyone's Rollie. But his brother had spoken the nickname in that same dry voice. There was no love in that voice, at least none that I could hear.

  LeBay went on: "My brother didn't write often, but he had a tendency to gloat, Mr. Cunningham. I wish there was a gentler word for it, but I don't believe there is. In his note, Rollie spoke of you as a 'sucker' and said he had given you what he called 'a royal screwing.'"

  My mouth dropped open. I turned to Arnie, half-expecting another outburst of rage. But his face hadn't changed at all.

  "A royal screwing," he said mildly, "is always in the eye of the beholder. Don't you think so, Mr. LeBay?"

  LeBay laughed . . . a little reluctantly, I thought.

  "This is my friend. He was with me the day I bought the car."

  I was introduced and shook George LeBay's hand.

  The soldiers had drifted away. The three of us, LeBay, Arnie, and I, were left eyeing one another uncomfortably. LeBay shifted his brother's flag from one hand to the other.

  "Can I do something for you, Mr. Cunningham?" LeBay asked at last.

  Arnie cleared his throat. "I was wondering about the garage," he said finally. "You see, I'm working on the car, trying to get her street-legal again. My folks don't want it at my house, and I was wondering--"

  "No."

  "--if maybe I could rent the garage--"

  "No, out of the question, it's really--"

  "I'd pay you twenty dollars a week," Arnie said. "Twenty-five, if you wanted." I winced. He was like a kid who has stumbled into quicksand and decides to cheer himself up by eating a few arsenic-laced brownies.

  "--impossible." LeBay was looking more and more distressed.

  "J
ust the garage," Arnie said, his calm starting to crack. "Just the garage where it originally was."

  "It can't be done," LeBay said. "I listed the house with Century 21, Libertyville Realty, and Pittsburgh Homes just this morning. They'll be showing the house--"

  "Yes, sure, in time, but until--"

  "--and it wouldn't do to have you tinkering around. You see, don't you?" He bent toward Arnie a little. "Please don't misunderstand me. I have nothing against teenagers in general--if I did, I'd probably be in a lunatic asylum now, because I've taught high school in Paradise Falls, Ohio, for almost forty years--and you seem to be a very intelligent, well-spoken example of the genus adolescent. But all I want to do here in Libertyville is sell the house and split whatever proceeds there may be with my sister in Denver. I want to be shut of the house, Mr. Cunningham, and I want to be shut of my brother's life."

  "I see," Arnie said. "Would it make any. difference if I promised to look after the place? Mow the grass? Repaint the trim? Make little repairs? I can be handy that way."

  "He really is good at stuff like that," I chipped in. It wouldn't hurt, I thought, for Arnie to remember later that I had been on his side . . . even if I wasn't.

  "I've already hired a fellow to keep an eye on the place and do a little maintenance," he said. It sounded plausible, but I knew, suddenly and surely, that it was a lie. And I think Arnie knew it, too.

  "All right. I'm sorry about your brother. He seemed like a. . .a very strong-willed man." As he said it, I found myself remembering turning around and seeing LeBay with large, greasy tears on his cheeks. Well, that's that. I'm shut of her, sonny.

  "Strong-willed?" LeBay smiled cynically. "Oh, yes. He was a strong-willed son of a bitch." He appeared not to notice Arnie's shocked expression. "Excuse me, gentlemen. I'm afraid the sun has upset my stomach a little."

  He started to walk away. We stood not far from the grave and watched him go. All at once he stopped, and Arnie's face brightened; he thought LeBay had suddenly changed his mind. For a moment LeBay just stood there on the grass, his head bent in the posture of a man thinking hard. Then he turned back to us.