Christine Read online

  I thought of Veronica LeBay and shivered.

  As if reading my thoughts--part of them, anyway--LeBay said, "I know very little about how my brother may have lived or felt during the last years of his life, but I'm quite sure of one thing, Dennis. When he felt, in 1965 or whenever it was, that it was time to put the car away, he put it away. And when he felt it was time to put it up for sale, he put it up for sale."

  He paused.

  "And I don't think I have anything else to tell you . . . except that I really believe your friend would be happier if he got rid of that car. I looked at him closely, your friend. He didn't look like a particularly happy young man at the present. Am I wrong about that?"

  I considered his question carefully. No, happiness wasn't exactly Arnie's thing, and never had been. But until the thing had begun with the Plymouth, he had seemed at least content . . . as if he had reached a modus vivendi with life. Not a completely happy one, but at least a workable one.

  "No," I said. "You're not wrong."

  "I don't believe my brother's car will make him happy. If anything, just the opposite." And as if he had read my thoughts of a few minutes before, he went on: "I don't believe in curses, you know. Nor in ghosts or anything precisely supernatural. But I do believe that emotions and events have a certain . . . lingering resonance. It may be that emotions can even communicate themselves in certain circumstances, if the circumstances are peculiar enough . . . the way a carton of milk will take the flavor of certain strongly spiced foods if it's left open in the refrigerator. Or perhaps that's only a ridiculous fancy on my part. Possibly it's just that I would feel better knowing the car my niece choked in and my sister-in-law killed herself in had been pressed down into a cube of meaningless metal. Perhaps all I feel is a sense of outraged propriety."

  "Mr. LeBay, you said you'd hired someone to take care of your brother's house until it was sold. Was that true?"

  He shifted a little in his chair. "No, it wasn't. I lied on impulse. I didn't like the thought of that car back in that garage . . . as if it had found its way home. If there are emotions and feelings that still live on, they would be there, as well as in the car herself." And very quickly he corrected himself: "Itself."

  Not long after, I said my goodbyes and followed my headlights home through the dark, thinking over everything LeBay had told me. I wondered if it would make any difference to Arnie if I told him one person had had a mortal accident in his car and another had actually died in it. I pretty well knew that it wouldn't; in his own way, Arnie could be every bit as stubborn as Roland LeBay himself. The lovely little scene over the car with his parents had shown that quite conclusively. The fact that he went on taking auto-shop courses down there in the Libertyville High version of the DMZ showed the same thing.

  I thought of LeBay saying, I didn't like the thought of that car back in that garage . . . as if it had found its way home.

  He had also said that his brother took the car someplace to work on it. And the only do-it-yourself garage in Libertyville now was Will Darnell's. Of course, there might have been another back in the 50s, but I didn't believe it. In my heart what I believed was that Arnie had been working on Christine in a place where she had been worked on before.

  Had been. That was the operant phrase. Because of the fight with Buddy Repperton, Arnie was afraid to leave it there any longer. So maybe that avenue to Christine's past was blocked off as well.

  And, of course, there were no curses. Even LeBay's idea about lingering emotions was pretty farfetched. I doubted if he really believed it himself. He had shown me an old scar, and he had used the word vengeance. And that was probably a lot closer to the truth than any phony supernatural bullshit. Of course.

  No; I was seventeen years old, bound for college in another year, and I didn't believe in such things as curses and emotions that linger and grow rancid, the spilled milk of dreams. I would not have granted you the power of the past to reach out horrid dead hands toward the living.

  But I'm a little older now.

  13/ Later That Evening

  As I was motorvating over the hill

  I saw Maybelline in a Coupe de Ville.

  Cadillac rollin down the open road,

  But nothin outrun my V8 Ford . . .

  --Chuck Berry

  My mother and Elaine had gone to bed, but my dad was up, watching the eleven o'clock news on TV. "Where you been, Dennis?" he asked.

  "Bowling," I said, the lie coming naturally and instinctively to my lips. I didn't want my father to know any of this. Peculiar as it was, it really wasn't peculiar enough to be more than moderately interesting. Or so I rationalized.

  "Arnie called," he said. "Asked me to have you call back if you got in before eleven-thirty or so."

  I glanced at my watch. It was only eleven-twenty. But hadn't I had enough of Arnie and Arnie's problems for one day?

  "Well?"

  "Well what?"

  "Are you going to call him?"

  I sighed. "Yeah, I guess I will."

  I went into the kitchen, slapped together a cold chicken sandwich, poured myself a glass of Hawaiian Punch--gross stuff, but I love it--and dialled Arnie's house. He picked up the phone himself on the second ring. He sounded happy and excited.

  "Dennis! Where you been?"

  "Bowling," I said.

  "Listen, I went down to Darnell's tonight, you know? And--this is great, Dennis--he gave Repperton the boot! Repperton's gone and I can stay!"

  That sensation of unformed dread in my belly again. I put my sandwich down. Suddenly I didn't want it anymore.

  "Arnie, do you think taking it back there is really such a good idea?"

  "What do you mean? Repperton's gone. That doesn't sound like a good idea to you?"

  I thought about Darnell ordering Arnie to turn of! his car before it polluted his cruddy garage, Darnell telling Arnie he didn't take any shit from kids like him. I thought about the shamefaced way Arnie had cut his eyes away from mine when he told me he had gotten lift-time to change his oil by doing "a couple of errands." I had an idea that Darnell might find it amusing to turn Arnie into his pet gofer. It would amuse the shit out of his other regulars and his poker buddies. Arnie goes out for coffee, Arnie goes out for doughnuts, Arnie changes the toilet paper rolls in the crapper and loads up the Nibroc dispenser with paper towels. Hey Will, who's the four-eyes swamping out the toilet in there? . . . Him? Name's Cunningham. His folks teach up at the college. He's taking a shithouse postgrad course down here. And they would laugh. Arnie would become the local joke down at Darnell's Garage on Hampton Street.

  I thought about those things, but I didn't say them. I figured Arnie could make up his own mind about whether he was treading water or shit. This couldn't go on forever--Arnie was just too smart. Or so I hoped. He was ugly, but he wasn't dumb.

  "Repperton being gone sounds like a fine idea," I said. "It was just that I thought Darnell's was sort of a temporary measure. I mean, twenty a week, Arnie, that's pretty stiff on top of the tools fees and the lift fees and all that happy crappy."

  "That's why I thought renting Mr. LeBay's garage would be so great," Arnie said. "I figured that even at twenty-five a week I'd be better off."

  "Well, there you go. If you put an ad in the paper for garage space, I bet you'd--"

  "No, no, let me finish," Arnie said. He was still excited. "When I went down there this afternoon Darnell took me aside right away. Said he was sorry about the ragging I had to take from Repperton. He said he misjudged me."

  "He said that?" I guess I believed it, but I didn't trust it.

  "Yeah. He asked me how I'd like to work for him part-time. Ten, maybe twenty hours a week during school. Putting stuff away, lubing the lifts, that kind of thing. And I can have the space for ten a week, tools fees and lift fees at half. How does that sound?"

  I thought it sounded too fucking good to be true.

  "Watch your ass, Arnie."

  "What?"

  "My dad says he's a crook."


  "I haven't seen any sign of it. I think that's all just talk, Dennis. He's a loudmouth, but I think that's all."

  "I'm just telling you to stay loose, that's all." I switched the phone to my other ear and drank some Hawaiian Punch. "Keep your eyes open and move away quick if anything starts to look heavy."

  "Are you talking about anything specific?"

  I thought of the vague stories about drugs, the more specific ones about hot cars.

  "No," I said. "I just don't trust him."

  "Well. . ." he said doubtfully, trailing away, and then came back to the original subject: Christine. With him it always got back to Christine. "But it's a break, a real break for me, Dennis, if it works out. Christine . . . she's really hurting. I've been able to do some things with her, but for everything I do it looks like there's four more. Some of it I don't even know how to do, but I'm going to learn."

  "Yeah," I said, and took a bite out of my sandwich. After my conversation with George LeBay, my enthusiasm for the subject of Arnie's best girl Christine had passed zero and entered the negative regions.

  "She needs a front-end alignment--hell, she needs a new front end-- and new brakeshoes . . . a ring-job . . . I may try to re-grind the pistons . . . but I can't do any of that stuff with my fifty-four-buck Craftsman toolkit. You see what I mean, Dennis?"

  He sounded like he was pleading for my approval. With a sinking in my stomach, I suddenly remembered a guy we had gone to school with. Freddy Darlington, his name had been. Freddy was no ball of fire, but he was an okay kid with a good sense of humor. Then he met some slut from Penn Hills--and I mean a real slut, one more than happy to stoop for the troops, bang for the gang, pick your pejorative. She had a mean, stupid face that reminded me of the back end of a Mack truck and she never stopped chewing gum. The stink of Juicy Fruit hung around her in a constant cloud. She got pregnant at about the same time Freddy got hung up on her. I always sort of figured he got hung up on her because she was the first girl to let him go all the way. So what happens is he drops out of school, gets a job in a warehouse, the princess has the baby, and he shows up with her at a party after the Junior Prom last December, wanting everything to seem the same when nothing is the same; she is looking at all of us guys with those dead, contemptuous eyes, her jaws are going up and down like the jaws of a cow working over a particularly tasty cud, and all of us have heard the news: she's back at the bowling alley, she's back at the Libertyville Rec, she's back at Gino's, she's out cruising while Freddy is working, she's back hard at work, banging for the gang and stooping for the troops. I know they say that a stiff dick has no conscience, but I tell you now that some cunts have teeth, and when I looked at Freddy, looking ten years older than he should have, I felt like I wanted to cry. And when he talked about her, he did it in that same pleading tone I had heard in Arnie's voice just now-- You really like her, guys, don't you? She's all right, isn't she, guys? I didn't fuck up too bad, did I, guys? I mean, this is probably just a bad dream and I'll wake up pretty soon, right? Right? Right?

  "Sure," I said into the telephone. That whole stupid, ugly Freddy Darlington business had gone through my mind in maybe two seconds. "I see what you mean, Arnie."

  "Good," he said, relieved.

  "Just watch out for your ass. And that goes double when you get back to school. Keep away from Buddy Repperton."

  "Yeah. You bet."

  "Arnie--"

  "What?"

  I paused. I wanted to ask him if Darnell had said anything about Christine being in his shop before, if he had recognized her. Even more, I wanted to tell him what had happened to Mrs. LeBay and to her small daughter, Rita. But I couldn't. He would know right away where I had gotten the information. And in his touchy state over the damn car, he would be apt to think I had gone behind his back--and in a way I had. But to tell him I had might well mean the end of our friendship.

  I had had enough of Christine, but I still cared for Arnie. Which meant that door had to be closed for good. No more creeping around and asking questions. No more lectures.

  "Nothing," I said. "I was just going to say that I guess you found a home for your rustbucket. Congratulations."

  "Dennis, are you eating something?"

  "Yeah, a chicken sandwich. Why?"

  "You're chewing in my ear. It really sounds gross."

  I began to smack as loudly as I could. Arnie made puking sounds. We both got laughing, and it was good--it was like the old days before he married that dumb fucking car.

  "You're an asshole, Dennis."

  "That's right. I learned it from you."

  "Get bent," he said, and hung up.

  I finished my sandwich and my Hawaiian Punch, rinsed the plate and the glass, and went back into the living room, ready to shower and go to bed. I was beat.

  Sometime during our phone conversation I had heard the TV go off and had assumed that my father had gone upstairs. But he hadn't. He was sitting in his recliner chair with his shirt open. I noticed with some unease how gray the hair on his chest was getting, and the way the reading lamp beside him shone through the hair on his head and showed his pink scalp. Getting thinner up there. My father was no kid. I realized with greater unease that in five years, by the time I would theoretically finish college, he would be fifty and balding--a stereotype accountant. Fifty in five years if he didn't just drop dead of another heart attack. The first one had not been bad--no myocardial scarring, he had told me on the one occasion I had asked. But he did not try to tell me that a second heart attack wasn't likely. I knew it was, my mom knew it was, and he did too. Only Ellie still thought he was invulnerable--but hadn't I seen a question in her eyes once or twice? I thought maybe I had.

  Died suddenly.

  I felt the hairs on my scalp stir. Suddenly. Straightening up at his desk, clutching his chest. Suddenly. Dropping his racket on the tennis court. You didn't want to think those thoughts about your father, but sometimes they come. God knows they do.

  "I couldn't help overhearing some of that," he said.

  "Yeah?" Warily.

  "Has Arnie Cunningham got his foot in a bucket of something warm and brown, Dennis?"

  "I . . . I don't know for sure," I said slowly. Because, after all, what did I have? Vapors, that was all.

  "You want to talk about it?"

  "Not right now, Dad, if it's okay."

  "It's fine," he said. "But if it . . . as you said on the phone, if it gets heavy, will you for God's sake tell me what's happening?"

  "Yes."

  "Okay." I started for the stairs and was almost there when he stopped me by saying, "I ran Will Darnell's accounts and did his income-tax returns for almost fifteen years, you know."

  I turned back to him, really surprised.

  "No. I didn't know that."

  My father smiled. It was a smile I had never seen before, one I would guess my mother had seen only a few times, my sis maybe not at all. You might have thought it was a sleepy sort of smile at first, but if you looked more closely you would have seen that it was not sleepy at all--it was cynical and hard and totally aware.

  "Can you keep your mouth shut about something, Dennis?"

  "Yes," I said. "I think so."

  "Don't just think so."

  "Yes. I can."

  "Better. I did his figures up until 1975, and then he got Bill Upshaw over in Monroeville."

  My father looked at me closely.

  "I won't say that Bill Upshaw is a crook, but I will say that his scruples are thin enough to read a newspaper through. And last year he bought himself a $300,000 English Tudor in Sewickley. Damn the interest rates, full speed ahead."

  He gestured at our own home with a small sweep of his right arm and then let it drop back into his own lap. He and my mother had bought it the year before I was born for $62,000--it was now worth maybe $150,000-and they had only recently gotten their paper back from the bank. We had a little party in the back yard late last summer; Dad lit the barbecue, put the pink slip on the long fo
rk, and each of us got a chance at holding it over the coals until it was gone.

  "No English Tudor here, huh, Denny?" he said.

  "It's fine," I said. I came back and sat down on the couch.

  "Darnell and I parted amicably enough," my father went on, "not that I ever cared very much for him in a personal way. I thought he was a wretch."

  I nodded a little, because I liked that; it expressed my gut feelings about Will Darnell better than any profanity could.

  "But there's all the difference in the world between a personal relationship and a business relationship. You learn that very quickly in this business, or you give it up and start selling Fuller Brushes door-to-door. Our business relationship was good, as far as it went . . . but it didn't go far enough. That was why I finally called it quits."

  "I don't get you."

  "Cash kept showing up," he said. "Large amounts of cash with no clear ancestry. At Darnell's direction I invested in two corporations-Pennsylvania Solar Heating and New York Ticketing--that sounded like two of the dummiest dummy corporations I've ever heard of. Finally I went to see him, because I wanted all my cards on the table. I told him that my professional opinion was that, if he got audited either by the IRS or by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania tax boys, he was apt to have a great deal of explaining to do, and that before long I was going to know too much to be an asset to him."

  "What did he say?"

  "He began to dance," my father said, still wearing that sleepy, cynical smile. "In my business, you start to get familiar with the steps of the dance by the time you're thirty-eight or so . . . if you're good at your business, that is. And I'm not all that bad. The dance starts off with the guy asking you if you're happy with your work, if it's paying you enough. If you say you like the work but you sure could be doing better, the guy encourages you to talk about whatever you're carrying on your back: your house, your car, your kids' college education--maybe you've got a wife with a taste for clothes a little fancier than she can by rights afford . . . see?"

  "Sounding you out?"

  "It's more like feeling you up," he said, and then laughed. "But yeah. The dance is every bit as mannered as a minuet. There are all sorts of phrases and pauses and steps. After the guy finds out what sort of financial burdens you'd like to get rid of, he starts asking you what sort of things you'd like to have. A Cadillac, a summer place in the Catskills or the Poconos, maybe a boat."