Christine Page 18

  Arnie looked at it and wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand.

  "Go up to the office, Buddy," Mr. Casey said quietly. "Wait until I get up there."

  "Screw the office!" Buddy cried. His voice was thin and hysterical with anger. Hair had fallen across his forehead again, and he flipped it back. "I'm getting out of this fucking pigsty."

  "Yes, all right, fine," Mr. Casey said, with no more inflection or excitement in his voice than he would have shown if Buddy had offered him a cup of coffee. I knew then that Buddy was all finished at Libertyville High. No detention or three-day vacation; his parents would be receiving the stiff blue expulsion form in the mail--the form would explain why their son was being expelled and would inform them of their rights and legal options in the matter.

  Buddy looked at Arnie and me--and he smiled. "I'll fix you," he said. "I'll get even. You'll wish you were never fucking born." He kicked the knife away, spinning and flashing. It came to rest on the edge of the hottop, and Buddy walked off, the cleats on the heels of his motorcycle boots clicking and scraping.

  Mr. Casey looked at us; his face was sad and tired. "I'm sorry," he said.

  "That's okay," Arnie replied.

  "Do you boys want dismissal slips? I'll write them for you if you feel you'd like to go home for the rest of the day."

  I glanced at Arnie, who was brushing off his shirt. He shook his head.

  "No, that's okay," I said.

  "All right. Just late slips then."

  We went into Mr. Casey's room and he wrote us late slips for our next class, which happened to be one we shared together--Advanced Physics. Coming into the physics lab, a lot of people looked at us curiously, and there was some whispering behind hands.

  The afternoon absence slip circulated at the end of period six. I checked it and saw the names Repperton, Vandenberg, and Welch, each with a (D) after his name. I thought that Arnie and I would be called to the office at the end of school to tell Ms. Lothrop, the discipline officer, what had happened. But we weren't.

  I looked for Arnie after school, thinking we'd ride home together and talk it over a little, but I was wrong about that too. He'd already left for Darnell's Garage to work on Christine.

  17/ Christine on the Street Again

  I got a 1966 cherry-red Mustang Ford

  She got a 380 horsepower overload,

  You know she's way too powerful

  To be crawling on these Interstate roads.

  --Chuck Berry

  I didn't get a chance to really talk to Arnie until after the football game the following Saturday. And that was also the first time since the day he had bought her that Christine was out on the street.

  The team went up to Hidden Hills, about sixteen miles away, on the quietest school-activity bus ride I've ever been on. We might have been going to the guillotine instead of to a football game. Even the fact that their record, 1-2, was only slightly better than ours, didn't cheer anybody up much. Coach Puffer sat in the seat behind the bus driver, pale and silent, as if he might be suffering from a hangover.

  Usually a trip to an away game was a combination caravan and circus. A second bus, loaded up with the cheerleaders, the band, and all the LHS kids who had signed up as "rooters" ("rooters," dear God! if we hadn't all been through high school, who the hell would believe it?), trundled along behind the team bus. Behind the two buses would be a line of fifteen or twenty cars, most of them full of teenagers, most with THUMP EM TERRIERS bumper stickers--beeping, flashing their lights, all that stuff you probably remember from your own high school days.

  But on this trip there was only the cheerleader/band bus (and that wasn't even full--in a winning year if you didn't sign up for the second bus by Tuesday, you were out of luck) and three or four cars behind that. The fair-weather friends had already bailed out. And I was sitting on the team bus next to Lenny Barongg, glumly wondering if I was going to get knocked out of my jock that afternoon, totally unaware that one of the few cars behind the bus today was Christine.

  I saw it when we got out of the bus in the Hidden Hills High School parking lot. Their band was already out on the field, and the thud from the big drum came clearly, oddly magnified under the lowering, cloudy sky. It was going to be the first really good Saturday for football, cool, overcast, and fallish.

  Seeing Christine parked beside the band bus was surprise enough, but when Arnie got out on one side and Leigh Cabot got out on the other, I was downright stunned--and more than a little jealous. She was wearing a clinging pair of brown woollen slacks and a white cableknit pullover, her blond hair spilling gorgeously over her shoulders.

  "Arnie," I said. "Hey, man!"

  "Hi, Dennis," he said a little shyly.

  I was aware that some of the players getting off the bus were also doing double-takes; here was Pizza-Face Cunningham with the gorgeous transfer from Massachusetts. How in God's name did that happen?

  "How are you?"

  "Good," he said. "Do you know Leigh Cabot?"

  "From class," I said. "Hi, Leigh."

  "Hi, Dennis. Are you going to win today?"

  I lowered my voice to a hoarse whisper. "It's all been fixed. Bet your ass off."

  Arnie blushed a little at that, but Leigh cupped her hand to her mouth and giggled.

  "We're going to try, but I don't know," I said.

  "We'll root you on to victory," Arnie said. "I can see it in tomorrow's paper now--Guilder Becomes Airborne, Breaks Conference TD Record."

  "Guilder Taken to Hospital with Fractured Skull, that's more likely," I said. "How many kids came up? Ten? Fifteen?"

  "More room on the bleachers for those of us that did," Leigh said. She took Arnie's arm--surprising and pleasing him, I think. Already I liked her. She could have been a bitch or mentally fast asleep--it seems to me that a lot of really beautiful girls are one or the other--but she was neither.

  "How's the rolling iron?" I asked, and walked over to the car.

  "Not too bad." He followed me over, trying not to grin too widely.

  The work had progressed, and now there was enough done on the Fury so that it didn't look quite so crazy and helter-skelter. The other half of the old, rusted front grille had been replaced, and the nest of cracks in the windshield was totally gone.

  "You replaced the windshield," I said.

  Arnie nodded.

  "And the hood."

  The hood was clean; brand-spanking new, in sharp contrast to the rust-flecked sides. It was a deep fire-engine red. Sharp-looking. Arnie touched it possessively, and the touch turned into a caress.

  "Yeah. I put that on myself."

  Something about that jagged on me. He had done it all himself, hadn't he?

  "You said you were going to turn it into a showpiece," I said. "I think I'm starting to believe you." I walked around to the driver's side. The upholstery on the insides of the doors and floor was still dirty and scuffed up, but now the front seat cover had been replaced as well as the back one.

  "It's going to be beautiful," Leigh said, but there was a flat note in her voice--it wasn't as naturally bright and effervescent as it had been when we were talking about the game--and that made me glance at her. A glance was all it took. She didn't like Christine. I realized it just like that, completely and absolutely, as if I had plucked one of her brainwaves out of the air. She would try to like the car because she liked Arnie. But. . . she wasn't ever going to really like it.

  "So you got it street-legal," I said.

  "Well . . ." Arnie looked uncomfortable. "It isn't. Quite."

  "What do you mean?"

  "The horn doesn't work, and sometimes the taillights go out when I step on the brake. It's a dead short somewhere, I think, but so far I haven't been able to chase it out."

  I glanced at the new windshield--there was a new inspection sticker on it. Arnie followed my glance and managed to look both embarrassed and a bit truculent at the same time. "Will gave me my sticker. He knows it's ninety percent there." And besides, I tho
ught, you had this hot date, right?

  "It's not dangerous, is it?" Leigh asked, addressing the question somewhere between Arnie and me. Her brow had creased slightly--I think maybe she sensed a sudden cold current between Arnie and me.

  "No," I said. "I don't think so. When you ride with Arnie you're riding with the original Old Creeping Jesus anyway."

  That broke the odd little pocket of tension that had built up. From the playing field there was a discordant shriek of brass, and then the band instructor's voice, carrying to us, thin but perfectly clear under the low sky: "Again, please! This is Rodgers and Hammerstein, not rock and ro-ool! Again, please!"

  The three of us looked at each other. Arnie and I started to laugh, and after a moment Leigh joined in. Looking at her, I felt that momentary jealousy again. I wanted nothing but the best for my friend Arnie, but she was really something--seventeen going on eighteen, gorgeous, perfect, healthy, alive to everything in her world. Roseanne was beautiful in her way, but Leigh made Roseanne look like a tree-sloth taking a nap.

  Was that when I started to want her? When I started to want my best friend's girl? Yeah, I suppose it was. But I swear to you, I never would have put a move on her if things had happened differently. I just don't think they were meant to happen differently. Or maybe I just have to feel that way.

  "We better go, Arnie, or we won't get a good seat in the visitors' bleachers," Leigh said with ladylike sarcasm.

  Arnie smiled. She was still holding his arm lightly, and he looked rather bowled over by it all. Why not? If it had been me, having my first experience with a live girl, and one as pretty as Leigh, I would have been three-quarters to being in love with her already. I wished him nothing but well with her. I guess I want you to believe that, even if you don't believe anything else I have to tell you from here on out. If anyone deserved a little happiness, it was Arnie.

  The rest of the team had gone into the visitors' dressing rooms at the back of the gymnasium wing of the school, and now Coach Puffer poked his head out.

  "Do you think you could favor us with your presence, Mr. Guilder?" he called. "I know it's a lot to ask, and I hope you'll forgive me if you had something more important to do, but if you don't, would you get your tail down into this locker room?"

  I muttered to Arnie and Leigh, "This is Rodgers and Hammerstein, not rock and ro-ool," and trotted toward the building.

  I walked toward the dressing rooms--Coach had popped back inside --and Arnie and Leigh started across to the bleachers. Halfway to the doors I stopped and went back to Christine. Late to suit up or not, I approached her in a circle; that absurd prejudice against walking in front of the car still held.

  On the rear end I saw a Pennsylvania dealer plate held on with a spring. I flipped it down and saw a Dymo tape stuck to the back side: THIS PLATE PROPERTY OF DARNELL'S GARAGE, LIBERTYVILLE, PA.

  I let the plate snap back and stood up, frowning. Darnell had given him a sticker while his car was still a ways from being street-legal; Darnell had loaned him a dealer plate so he could use the car to bring Leigh to the game. Also, he had stopped being "Darnell" to Arnie; today he had called him "Will." Interesting, but not very comforting.

  I wondered if Arnie was dumb enough to think that the Will Darnells of this world ever did favors out of the goodness of their hearts. I hoped he wasn't, but I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure of much about Arnie anymore. He had changed a lot in the last few weeks.

  We surprised the hell out of ourselves and won the game--as it turned out, that was one of only two we won that whole season . . . not that I was with the team when the season ended.

  We had no right to win; we went out on the field feeling like losers, and we lost the toss. The Hillmen (dumb name for a team, but what's so bright about being known as the Terriers when you get right down to it?) went forty yards on their first two plays, going through our defensive line like cheese through a goose. Then, on the third play--their third first-and-ten in a row--their quarterback coughed up the ball. Gary Tardiff grabbed it up and rambled sixty yards for the score, a great big grin on his face.

  The Hillmen and their coach went bananas protesting that the ball had been dead at the line of scrimmage, but the officials disagreed and we led 6-0. From my place on the bench I was able to look across at the visitors' bleachers and could see that the few Libertyville fans there were going crazy. I guess they had a right to; it was the first time we'd led in a game all season. Arnie and Leigh were waving Terriers pennants. I waved at them. Leigh saw me, waved back, then elbowed Arnie. He waved back too. They looked as if they were getting pretty chummy up there, which made me grin.

  As for the game, we never looked back after that first flukey score. We had that mystic thing, momentum, on our side--maybe for the only time that year. I didn't break the Conference touchdown record as Arnie had predicted, but I scored three times, one of them on a ninety-yard runback, the longest I ever made. At half time it was 17-0, and Coach was a new man. He saw a complete turnaround ahead of us, the greatest comeback in the history of the Conference. Of course that turned out to be a fool's dream, but he surely was excited that day, and I felt good for him, as I had for Arnie and Leigh, getting to know each other so profitably and easily.

  The second half was not so good; our defense resumed the mostly prone posture it had assumed in our first three games, but it was still never really close. We won 27-18.

  Coach had taken me out halfway through the fourth quarter to put in Brian McNally, who would be replacing me next year--actually even earlier than that, as it turned out. I showered and changed up, then came back out just as the two-minute warning went off.

  The parking lot was full of cars but empty of people. Wild cheering came from the field as the Hillmen fans urged their team to do the impossible in the last two minutes of play. From this distance it all seemed as unimportant as it undoubtedly was.

  I walked over toward Christine.

  There she sat with her rust-flecked sides and her new hood and her tailfins that seemed a thousand miles long. A dinosaur from the dark ditty-bop days of the 50s when all the oil millionaires were from Texas and the Yankee dollar was kicking the shit out of the Japanese yen instead of the other way around. Back in the days when Carl Perkins was singing about pink pedal pushers and Johnny Horton was singing about dancing all night on a honky-tonk hardwood floor and the biggest teen idol in the country was Edd "Kookie" Byrnes.

  I touched Christine. I tried to caress it as Arnie had done; to like it for Arnie's sake as Leigh had done. Surely if anyone should be able to make himself like it, it should be me. Leigh had only known Arnie a month. I had known him my whole life.

  I slipped my hand along the rusty surface and I thought of George LeBay, and Veronica and Rita LeBay, and somewhere along the line the hand that was supposed to be caressing closed into a fist and I suddenly slammed it down on Christine's flank as hard as I could--plenty hard enough to hurt my hand and make myself utter a defensive little laugh and wonder what the hell I thought I was doing.

  The sound of rust sifting down onto the hottop in small flakes.

  The sound of a bass drum from the football field, like a giant's heartbeat.

  The sound of my own heartbeat.

  I tried the front door.

  It was locked.

  I licked my lips and realized I was scared.

  It was almost as if--this was very funny, this was hilarious--it was almost as if this car didn't like me, as if it suspected me of wanting to come between it and Arnie, and that the reason I didn't want to walk in front of it was because--

  I laughed again and then remembered my dream and stopped laughing. This was too much like it for comfort. It wasn't Chubby McCarthy blaring over the PA, of course, not in Hidden Hills, but the rest of it brought on a dreamy, unpleasant sense of deja vu--the sound of the cheers, the sound of padded body contact, the wind hissing through trees that looked like cutouts under an overcast sky.

  The engine would gun. The car would lurch forw
ard, drop back, lurch forward, drop back. And then the tires would scream as it roared right at me--

  I shook the thought off. It was time to stop pandering to myself with all of this crazy shit. It was time--and overtime--to get my imagination under control. This was a car, not a she but an it, not really Christine at all but only a 1958 Plymouth Fury that had rolled off an assembly line in Detroit along with about four hundred thousand others.

  It worked . . . at least temporarily. Just to demonstrate how little afraid of it I was, I got down on my knees, and looked under it. What I saw there was even crazier than the haphazard way the car was being rebuilt on top. There were three new Pleasurizer shocks, but the fourth was a dark, oil-caked ruin that looked as if it had been on there forever. The tailpipe was so new it was still silvery, but the muffler looked at least middle-aged and the header pipe was in very bad shape. Looking at the header, thinking about exhaust fumes that could leak into the car from it, made me flash on Veronica LeBay again. Because exhaust fumes can kill. They--

  "Dennis, what are you doing?"

  I guess I was still more uneasy than I thought, because I was up from my knees like a shot with my heart beating in my throat. It was Arnie. He looked cold and angry.

  Because I was looking at his car? Why should that make him mad? Good question. But it had, that was obvious.

  "I was looking over your mean machine," I said, trying to sound casual. "Where's Leigh?"

  "She had to go to the Ladies'," he said, dismissing her. His gray eyes never left my face. "Dennis, you're the best friend I've got, the best friend I've ever had. You might have saved me a trip to the hospital the other day when Repperton pulled that knife, and I know it. But don't you go behind my back, Dennis. Don't you ever do that."

  From the playing field there was a tremendous cheer--the Hillmen had just made the final score of the game, with less than thirty seconds to play.

  "Arnie, I don't know what the hell you're talking about," I said, but I felt guilty. I felt guilty the way I had felt being introduced to Leigh, sizing her up, wanting her a little--wanting the girl he so obviously wanted himself. But . . . going behind his back? Was that what I had been doing?