had been pretty goddam pissed off. But now, standing here on her stoop, he thought he could understand—and marvel that he could want to deny her anything or cross her will in any way. “I know exactly what you mean.”
She hugged him, her arms locked around his neck. Her coat was still open, and he could feel the soft, maddening weight of her breasts.
“I love you,” she said for the first time, and then slipped inside to leave him standing there on the porch momentarily, agreeably stunned, and much warmer than he should have been in the ticking, pattering sleet of late autumn.
The idea that the Cabots might find it peculiar if he stood on their front stoop much longer in the sleet at last percolated down into his bemused brain. Arnie went back down the walk through the tick and patter, snapping his fingers and grinning. He was riding the rollercoaster now, the one that’s the best ride, the one they really only let you take once.
Near the place where the concrete path joined the sidewalk, he stopped, the smile fading off his face. Christine stood at the kerb, drops of melted sleet pearling her glass, smearing the red dash lights from the inside. He had left Christine running, and she had stalled. This was the second time.
“Wet wires,” he muttered under his breath. “That’s all.” It couldn’t be plugs; he had put in a whole new set just the day before yesterday, at Will’s. Eight new Champions and—
Which of us do you spend more time with? Me… or her?
The smile returned, but this time it was uneasy. Well, he spent more time around cars in general—of course. That came of working for Will. But it was ridiculous to think that…
You lied to her. That’s the truth, isn’t it?
No, he answered himself uneasily. No, I don’t think you could say I really lied to her…
No? Then just what do you call it?
For the first and only time since he had taken her to the football game at Hidden Hills, he had told her a big fat lie. Because the truth was, he spent more time with Christine, and he hated having her parked in the thirty-day section of the airport parking lot, out in the wind and the rain, soon to be snow—
He had lied to her.
He spent more time with Christine.
And that was—
Was—
“Wrong,” he croaked, and the word was almost lost in the slick, mysterious sound of the falling sleet.
He stood on the walk, looking at his stalled car, marvellously resurrected time traveller from the era of Buddy Holly and Khrushchev and Laika the Space Dog, and suddenly he hated it. It had done something to him, he wasn’t sure what. Something.
The dash lights, blurred into football-shaped red eyes by the moisture on the window, seemed to mock him and reproach him at the same time.
He opened the driver’s side door, slipped behind the wheel, and pulled the door shut again. He closed his eyes. Peace flowed over him and things seemed to come back together. He had lied to her, yes, but it was a little lie. A mostly unimportant lie. No—a completely unimportant lie.
He reached out without opening his eyes and touched the leather rectangle the keys were attached to—old and scuffed, the initials R.D.L. burned into it. He had seen no need to get a new keyring, or a piece of leather with his own initials on it.
But there was something peculiar about the leather tab the keys were attached to, wasn’t there? Yes. Quite peculiar indeed.
When he had counted out the cash on LeBay’s kitchen table and LeBay had skittered the keys across the red-and-white-checked oilcloth to him, the rectangle of leather had been scuffed and nicked and darkened by age, the initials almost obliterated by time and the constant friction of rubbing against the change in the old man’s pocket and the material of the pocket itself.
Now the initials stood out fresh and clear again. They had been renewed.
But, like the lie, that was really unimportant. Sitting inside the metal shell of Christine’s body, he felt very strongly that that was true.
He knew it. Quite unimportant, all of it.
He turned the key. The starter whined, but for a long time the engine wouldn’t catch. Wet wires. Of course that was what it was.
“Please,” he whispered. “It’s all right, don’t worry, everything is the same.”
The engine fired, missed. The starter whined on and on. Sleet ticked coldly on the glass. It was safe in here; it was dry and warm. If the engine would start.
“Come on,” Arnie whispered. “Come on, Christine. Come on, hon.”
The engine fired again, caught. The dash lights flickered and went out. The IGN light pulsed weakly again as the motor stuttered, then went out for good as the beat of the engine smoothed out into a clean hum.
The heater blew warm air gently around his legs, negating the winter chill outside.
It seemed to him that there were things Leigh could not understand, things she could never understand. Because she hadn’t been around. The pimples. The cries of Hey Pizza-Face! The wanting to speak, the wanting to reach out to other people, and the inability. The impotence. It seemed to him that she couldn’t understand the simple fact that, had it not been for Christine, he never would have had the courage to call her on the phone even if she had gone around with I WANT TO DATE ARNIE CUNNINGHAM tattooed on her forehead. She couldn’t understand that he sometimes felt thirty years older than his age—no! more like fifty! and not a boy at all but some terribly hurt veteran back from an undeclared war.
He caressed the steering wheel. The green cats” eyes of the dash instruments glowed back at him comfortingly.
“Okay,” he said. Almost sighed.
He dropped the gearshift into big D and flicked on the radio. Dee Dee Sharp singing “Mashed Potato Time'; mystic nonsense on the radio waves coming out of the dark.
He pulled out, planning to head for the airport, where he would park his car and catch the bus that ran back to town on the hour. And he did that, but not in time to take the 11:00 p.m. bus as he had intended. He took the midnight bus instead, and it was not until he was in bed that night recalling Leigh’s warm kisses instead of the way Christine wouldn’t fire up, that it occurred to him that somewhere that evening, after leaving the Cabot house and before arriving at the airport, he had lost an hour. It was so obvious that he felt like a man who has turned the house upside down looking for a vital bit of correspondence, only to discover that he has been holding it in his other hand all along. Obvious… and a little scary.
Where had he been?
He had a blurry memory of drawing away from the kerb in front of Leigh’s and then just…
… just cruising.
Yeah. Cruising. That was all. No big deal.
Cruising through the thickening sleet, cruising empty streets that were plated with the stuff, cruising without snow tyres (and yet Christine, incredibly surefooted, never missed her way or skidded around a corner, Christine seemed to find the safe and secure way as if by magic, the ride as solid as it would have been if the car had been on trolley-tracks), cruising with the radio on, spilling out a constant stream of oldies that seemed to consist solely of girls” names: Peggy Sue, Carol, Barbara-Ann, Susie Darlin”.
It seemed to him that at some point he had gotten a little frightened and had punched one of the chrome buttons on the converter he’d installed, but instead of FM-104 and the Block Party Weekend he got WDIL all over again, only now the disc jockey sounded crazily like Alan Freed, and the voice that followed was that of Screamin” Jay Hawkins, hoarse and chanting: “I put a spell on youuu… because you’re miiiiiine…”
And then at last there had been the airport with its foul-weather lights pulsing sequentially like a visible heartbeat. Whatever had been on the radio faded to a meaningless jumble of static and he had turned it off. Getting out of the car he had felt a sweaty, incomprehensible sort of relief.
Now he lay in bed, needing to sleep but unable, The sleet had thickened and curdled into fat white splats of snow.
It wasn’t right.
Something had been started, something was going on. He couldn’t even lie to himself and say that he didn’t
