Christine Read online

  Simple as that.

  No consideration at all, and that wasn't like Arnie, who usually thought things out so carefully--his life had made him all too painfully aware of what happened to guys like him when they went off half-cocked and did something (gasp!) on impulse. But this time he had been like a man who meets a showgirl, indulges in a whirlwind courtship, and ends up with a hangover and a new wife on Monday morning.

  It had been . . . well. . . like love at first sight.

  Never mind, I thought. We'll start over again. Tomorrow we'll start over. We'll get some perspective on this.

  And so finally I went to sleep. And dreamed.

  The whining spin of a starter in darkness.

  Silence.

  The starter, whining again.

  The engine fired, missed, then caught.

  An engine running in darkness.

  Then headlights came on, high beams, old-fashioned twin beams, spearing me like a bug on glass.

  I was standing in the open doorway of Roland D. LeBay's garage, and Christine sat inside--a new Christine with not a dent or a speck of rust on her. The clean, unblemished windshield darkened to a polarized blue strip at the top. From the radio came the hard rhythmic sounds of Dale Hawkins doing "Susie-Q"--a voice from a dead age, full of somehow frightening vitality.

  The motor muttering words of power through dual glasspack mufflers. And somehow I knew there was a Hurst shifter inside, and Feully headers; the Quaker State oil had just been changed--it was a clean amber color, automotive lifeblood.

  The wipers suddenly start up, and that's strange because there's no one behind the wheel, the car is empty.

  --Come on, big guy. Let's go for a ride. Let's cruise.

  I shake my head. I don't want to get in there. I'm scared to get in there. I don't want to cruise. And suddenly the engine begins to rev and fall off, rev and fall off; it's a hungry sound, frightening, and each time the engine revs Christine seems to lunge forward a bit, like a mean dog on a weak leash . . . and I want to move . . . but my feet seem nailed to the cracked pavement of the driveway.

  --Last chance, big guy.

  And before I can answer--or even think of an answer--there is the terrible scream of rubber kissing off concrete and Christine lunges out at me, her grille snarling like an open mouth full of chrome teeth, her headlights glaring--

  I screamed myself awake in the dead darkness of two in the morning, the sound of my own voice scaring me, the hurried, running thud of bare feet coming down the hall scaring me even worse. I had double handfuls of sheet in both hands. I'd pulled the sheet right out; it was all wadded up in the middle of the bed. My body was sweat-slippery.

  Down the hall, Ellie cried out "What was that?" in her own terror.

  My light flooded on and there was my mom in a shorty nightgown that showed more than she would have allowed except in the direst of emergencies, and right behind her, my dad, belting his bathrobe closed over nothing at all.

  "Honey, what is it?" my mom asked me. Her eyes were wide and scared. I couldn't remember the last time she had called me "honey" like that--when I was fourteen? twelve? ten, maybe? I don't know.

  "Dennis?" Dad asked.

  Then Elaine was standing behind and between them, shivering.

  "Go back to bed," I said. "It was a dream, that's all. Nothing."

  "Wow," Elaine said, shocked into respect by the hour and the occasion. "Must have been a real horror-movie. What was it, Dennis?"

  "I dreamed that you married Milton Dodd and then came to live with me," I said.

  "Don't tease your sister," Mom said. "What was it, Dennis?"

  "I don't remember," I said.

  I was suddenly aware that the sheet was a mess, and there was a dark tuft of pubic hair poking out. I rearranged things in a hurry, with guilty thoughts of masturbation, wet dreams, God knows what else shooting through my head. Total dislocation. For that first spinning moment or two, I hadn't even been sure if I was big or little--there was only that dark, terrifying, and overmastering image of the car lunging forward a little each time the engine revved, dropping back, lunging forward again, the hood vibrating over the engine-bucket, the grille like steel teeth--

  Last chance, big guy.

  Then my mother's hand, cool and dry, was on my forehead, hunting fever.

  "It's all right, Mom," I said. "It was nothing. Just a nightmare."

  "But you don't remember--"

  "No. It's gone now."

  "I was scared," she said, and then uttered a shaky little laugh. "I guess you don't know what scared is until one of your kids screams in the dark."

  "Ugh, gross, don't talk about it," Elaine said.

  "Go back to bed, little one," Dad said, and gave her butt a light swat.

  She went, not looking totally happy about it. Maybe once she was over her own initial fright, she was hoping I'd break down and have hysterics. That would have given her a real scoop with the training bra set down at the rec program in the morning.

  "You really okay?" my mother asked. "Dennis? Hon?"

  That word again, bringing back memories of knees scraped falling out of my red wagon; her face, lingering over my bed as it had while I lay in the feverish throes of all those childhood illnesses--mumps, measles, a bout of scarletina. Making me feel absurdly like crying. I had nine inches and seventy pounds on her.

  "Sure," I said.

  "All right," she said. "Leave the light on. Sometimes it helps."

  And with a final doubtful look at my dad, she went out. I had something to be bemused about--the idea that my mother had ever had a nightmare. One of those things that never occur to you, I guess. Whatever her nightmares were, none of them had ever found their way into Sketches of Love and Beauty.

  My dad sat down on the bed. "You really don't remember what it was about?"

  I shook my head.

  "Must have been bad, to make you yell like that, Dennis." His eyes were on mine, gravely asking if there was something he should know.

  I almost told him--the car, it was Arnie's goddam car, Christine the Rust Queen, twenty years old, ugly fucking thing. I almost told him. But then somehow it choked in my throat, almost as if to speak would have been to betray my friend. Good old Arnie, whom a fun-loving God had decided to swat with the ugly-stick.

  "All right," he said, and kissed my cheek. I could feel his beard, those stiff little bristles that only come out at night, I could smell his sweat and feel his love. I hugged him hard, and he hugged me back.

  Then they were all gone, and I lay there with the bedtable lamp burning, afraid to go back to sleep. I got a book and lay back down, knowing that my folks were lying awake in their room, wondering if I was in some kind of a mess, or if I had gotten someone else--the cheerleader with the fantastic body, maybe--in some kind of a mess.

  I decided sleep was an impossibility. I would read until daylight and catch a nap tomorrow afternoon, maybe, during the dull part of the ballgame. And thinking that, I fell asleep and woke up in the morning with the book lying unopened on the floor beside the bed.

  8 / First Changes

  If I had money I will tell you

  what I'd do,

  I would go downtown and buy

  a Mercury or two,

  I would buy me a Mercury,

  And cruise up and down this road.

  --The Steve Miller Band

  I thought Arnie would turn up that Saturday, so I hung around the house--mowed the lawn, cleaned up the garage, even washed all three cars. My mother watched all this industry with some amazement and commented over a lunch of hotdogs and green salad that maybe I should have nightmares more often.

  I didn't want to phone Arnie's house, not after all the unpleasantness I had seen there lately, but when the pre-game show came on and he still hadn't shown, I took my courage in my hands and called. Regina answered, and although she was doing a good facsimile of nothing-has-changed, I thought I detected a new coolness in her voice. It made me feel sad. Her only son had been
seduced by a baggy old whore named Christine, and old buddy Dennis must have been an accomplice. Maybe he had even pimped the deal. Arnie wasn't home, she said. He was at Darnell's Garage. He had been there since nine that morning.

  "Oh," I said lamely. "Oh, wow. I didn't know that." It sounded like a lie. Even more, it felt like a lie.

  "No?" Regina said in that new cool way. "Goodbye, Dennis."

  The phone was dead in my hand. I looked at it awhile and then hung up.

  Dad was parked in front of the TV in his gross purple Bermudas and his Jesus-shoes, a six-pack of Stroh's crashed down in the cooler beside him. The Phillies were having a good day, belting the almighty hell out of Atlanta. My mom had gone out to visit one of her classmates (I think they read each other their sketches and poems and got exalted together). Elaine had gone over to her friend Delia's house. Our place was quiet; outside, the sun played tag with a few benign white clouds.

  Dad gave me a beer, which he does only when he's feeling extraordinarily mellow.

  But Saturday still felt flat. I kept thinking of Arnie, not watching the Phillies or soaking up the rays, not even mowing the grass over at his house and getting his feet green. Arnie in the oily shadows of Will Darnell's Do-It-Yourself Garage, playing games with that silent, rusting hulk while men shouted and tools clanged on the cement with that piercing white-metal sound, the machine-gun drill of pneumatic guns loosening old bolts, Will Darnell's wheezy voice and asthmatic cough--

  And goddammit, was I jealous? Was that what it was?

  When the seventh inning came along I got up and started to go out.

  "Where you going?" my dad asked.

  Yeah, just where was I going? Down there? To watch him, cluck over him, listen to Will Darnell get on his case? Heading for another dose of misery? Fuck it. Arnie was a big boy now.

  "Noplace," I said. I found a Twinkie tucked carefully away in the back of the breadbox and took it with a certain doleful glee, knowing how pissed Elaine was going to be when she shlepped out during one of the commercials on Saturday Night Live and found it gone. "Noplace at all."

  I came back into the living room and sat down and cadged another beer off my dad and ate Elaine's Twinkie and even lapped the cardboard it had been on. We watched Philly finish the job of ruining Atlanta ("They roont em, Denny," I could hear my grandfather, now five years dead, saying in his cackly old man's voice, "they roont em good!") and didn't think about Arnie Cunningham at all.

  Hardly at all.

  He came over on his tacky old three-speed the next afternoon while Elaine and I were playing croquet on the back lawn. Elaine kept accusing me of cheating. She was on one of her rips. Elaine always went on "rips" when she was "getting her period." Elaine was very proud of her period. She had been having one regularly all of fourteen months.

  "Hey," Arnie said, ambling around the corner of the house, "it's either the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Bride of Frankenstein or Dennis and Ellie."

  "What do you say, man?" I asked. "Grab a mallet."

  "I'm not playing," Elaine said, throwing her mallet down. "He cheats even worse than you do. Men!"

  As she stalked off, Arnie said in a trembling affected voice, "That's the first time she ever called me a man, Dennis."

  He fell to his knees, a look of exalted adoration on his face. I started laughing. He could do it good when he wanted to, Arnie could. That was one of the reasons I liked him as well as I did. And it was a kind of secret thing, you know. I don't think anyone really saw that wit except me. I once heard about some millionaire who had a stolen Rembrandt in his basement where no one but him could see it. I could understand that guy. I don't mean that Arnie was a Rembrandt, or even a world-class wit, but I could understand the attraction of knowing about something good . . . something that was good but still a secret.

  We goofed around the croquet course for a while, not really playing, just whopping the Jesus out of each other's balls. Finally one went through the hedge into the Blackfords' yard, and after I crawled through to get it, neither of us wanted to play anymore. We sat down in the lawn chairs. Pretty soon our cat, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Captain Beefheart's replacement, came creeping out from under the porch, probably hoping to find some cute little chipmunk to murder slowly and nastily. His amber-green eyes glinted in the afternoon light, which was overcast and muted.

  "Thought you'd be over for the game yesterday," I said. "It was a good one."

  "I was at Darnell's," he said. "Heard it on the radio, though." His voice went up three octaves and he did a very good imitation of my granddad. "They roont em! They roont em, Denny!"

  I laughed and nodded. There was something about him that day-- perhaps it was only the light, which was bright enough but still somehow gloomy and spare--something that looked different. He looked tired, for one thing--there were circles under his eyes--but at the same time his complexion seemed a trifle better than it had been lately. He had been drinking a lot of Cokes on the job, knowing he shouldn't, of course, but unable to help succumbing to temptation from time to time. His skin problems tended to go in cycles, as most teenagers' do, depending on their moods--except in Arnie's case, the cycles were usually from bad to worse and back to bad again.

  Or maybe it was just the light.

  "What'd you do on it?" I asked.

  "Not much. Changed the oil. Looked the block over. It's not cracked, Dennis, that's one thing. LeBay or somebody left the drain-plug out somewhere along the fine, that's all. A lot of the old oil had leaked out. I was lucky not to fry a piston driving it Friday night."

  "How'd you get lift-time? I thought you had to reserve that in advance."

  His eyes shifted away from mine. "No problem there," he said, but there was deception in his voice. "I ran a couple of errands for Mr. Darnell."

  I opened my mouth to ask what errands, and then I decided I didn't want to hear. Probably the "couple of errands" boiled down to no more than running around the corner to Schirmer's Luncheonette and bringing back coffee-and for the regulars or crating up various used auto parts for later sale, but I didn't want to be involved in the Christine end of Arnie's life, and that included how he was getting along (or not getting along) down at Darnell's Garage.

  And there was something else--a feeling of letting go. I either couldn't define that feeling very well back then or didn't want to. Now I guess I'd say it's the way you feel when a friend of yours falls in love and marries a right high-riding, dyed-in-the-wool bitch. You don't like the bitch and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the bitch doesn't like you, so you just close the door on that room of your friendship. When the thing is done, you either let go of the subject. . . or you find your friend letting go of you, usually with the bitch's enthusiastic approval.

  "Let's go to the movies," Arnie said restlessly.

  "What's on?"

  "Well, there's one of those gross Kung-fu movies down at the State Twin, how does that sound? Heee-yah!" He pretended to administer a savage karate kick to Screaming Jay Hawkins, and Screaming Jay took off like a shot.

  "Sounds pretty good. Bruce Lee?"

  "Nah, some other guy."

  "What's it called?"

  "I don't know. Fists of Danger. Flying Hands of Death. Or maybe it was Genitals of Fury, I don't know. What do you say? We can come back and tell the gross parts to Ellie and make her puke."

  "All right," I said. "If we can still get in for a buck each."

  "Yeah, we can until three."

  "Let's go."

  We went. It turned out to be a Chuck Norris movie, not bad at all. And on Monday we went back to building the Interstate extension. I forgot about my dream. Gradually I realized that I wasn't seeing as much of Arnie as I used to; again, it was the way you seem to fall out of touch with a guy who has just gotten married. Besides, my thing with the cheerleader began to heat up around then. My thing was heating up, all right--more than one night I brought her home from the submarine races at the drive-in with my balls throbbing so badly I could barel
y walk.

  Arnie, meanwhile, was spending most of his evenings at Darnell's.

  9 / Buddy Repperton

  And I know, no matter what the cost,

  Oooooh, that dual exhaust

  Makes my motor cry,

  My baby's got the Cadillac Walk.

  --Moon Martin

  Our last full week of work before school started was the week before Labor Day. When I pulled up to Arnie's house to pick him up that morning, he came out with a great big blue-black shiner around one eye and an ugly scrape upside his face.

  "What happened to you?"

  "I don't want to talk about it," he said sullenly. "I had to talk to my parents about it until I thought I was gonna croak." He tossed his lunch pail in back and lapsed into a grim silence that lasted all the way to work. Some of the other guys ribbed him about his shiner, but Arnie just shrugged it off.

  I didn't say anything about it on the way home, just played the radio and kept myself to myself. And I might not have heard the story at all if I hadn't been waylaid by this greasy Irish wop named Gino just before we turned off Main Street.

  Back then Gino was always waylaying me--he could reach right through a closed car window and do it. Gino's Fine Italian Pizza is on the corner of Main and Basin Drive, and every time I saw that sign with the pizza going up in the air and all the i's dotted with shamrocks (it flashed off and on at night, how funky can you get, am I right?), I'd feel the waylaying start again. And tonight my mother would be in class, which meant a pick-up supper at home. The prospect didn't fill me with joy. Neither my dad nor I was much of a cook, and Ellie would burn water.

  "Let's get a pizza," I said, pulling into Gino's parking lot. "What do you say? A big greasy one that smells like armpits."

  "Jesus, Dennis, that's gross!"

  "Clean armpits," I amended. "Come on."

  "Nah, I'm pretty low on cash," Arnie said listlessly.

  "I'll buy. You can even have those horrible fucking anchovies on your half. What do you say?"

  "Dennis, I really don't--"

  "And a Pepsi," I said.

  "Pepsi racks my complexion. You know that."

  "Yeah, I know. A great big Pepsi, Arnie."