calf—popped back out.
Christine looked like new.
The car stopped in front of the large garage door in the middle of the darkened, silent building. There was a small plastic box clipped to the driver’s side sun-visor. This was a little doodad Will Darnell had given Arnie when Arnie began to run cigarettes and booze over into New York State for him—it was, perhaps, Darnell s version of a gold key to the crapper.
In the still air the door-opener hummed briefly, and the garage door rattled obediently up. Another circuit was made by the rising door, and a few interior rights came on, burning weakly.
The headlight knob on the dashboard suddenly went in, and Christine’s duals went out. She rolled inside and whispered across the oil-stained concrete to stall twenty. Behind her, the overhead door, which had been set on a thirty-second timer, rolled back down. The light circuit was broken, and the garage was dark again.
In Christine’s ignition switch, the keys dangling down suddenly turned to the left. The engine died. The leather patch with the initials R.D.L. branded into it swung back and forth in decreasing arcs and was finally still.
Christine sat in the dark, and the only sound in Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage was the slow tick of her cooling engine.
31
THE DAY AFTER
I got a ’69 Chevy with a 396,
Feully heads and a Hurst on the floor,
She’s waitin tonight
Down in the parking-lot
Outside the 7–11 store…
Arnie Cunningham did not go to school the next day. He said he thought he might be coming down with the flu. But that evening he told his parents that he felt enough improved to go down to Darnell’s and do some work on Christine.
Regina protested—although she did not come right out and say so, she thought Arnie looked like death warmed over. His face was now entirely free of acne and blemishes, but there was a trade-off: it was much too pale, and there were dark circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t been sleeping. In addition, he was still limping. She wondered uneasily if her son could be using some sort of drug, if perhaps he had hurt his back worse than he had let on and had started taking pills so he could go on working on the goddamned car. Then she dismissed the thought. Obsessed as he might be with the car, Arnie could not be that stupid.
“I’m really fine, Mom,” he said.
“You don’t look fine. And you hardly touched your supper.”
“I’ll get some chow later on.”
“How’s your back? You’re not lifting a lot of heavy stuff down there, are you?”
“No, Mom.” This was a lie. And his back had hurt terribly all day long. This was the worst it had been since the original injury at Philly Plains (oh, was that where it started? His mind whispered, oh really? Are you sure?). He had taken the brace off for a while, and his back had throbbed fit to kill him. He had put it on again after only fifteen minutes, cinching it tighter than ever. Now his back really was a little better. And he knew why. He was going to her. That was why.
Regina looked at him, worried and at a loss. For the first time in her life she simply did not know how to proceed. Arnie was beyond her control now. Knowing it brought on a horrible feeling of despair that sometimes crept up on her and filled her brain with an awful, empty, rotten coldness. At these times a depression so total she could barely credit it would steal through her, making her wonder exactly what it was she had lived her life for—so her son could fall in love with a girl and a car all in the same terrible fall? Was that it? So she could see exactly how hateful to him she had become when she looked in his grey eyes? Was that it? And it really didn’t have anything to do with the girl at all, did it? No. In her mind, it always came back to the car. Her rest had become broken and uneasy, and for the first time since her miscarriage nearly twenty years before, she had found herself considering making an appointment with Dr Mascia to see if he would give her some pill for the stress and the depression and the attendant insomnia. She thought about Arnie on her long sleepless nights, and about mistakes that could never be rectified; she thought about how time had a way of swinging the balance of power on its axis, and how old age had a way of sometimes looking through a dressing-table mirror like the hand of a corpse poking through eroded earth.
“Will you be back early?” she asked, knowing this was the last breastwork of the truly powerless parent, hating it, unable—now—to change it.
“Sure,” he said, but she didn’t much trust the way he said it.
“Arnie, I wish you’d stay home. You really don’t look good at all.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Got to be. I have to run some auto parts over to Jamesburg for Will tomorrow.”
“Not if you’re sick,” she said. “That’s nearly a hundred and fifty miles.”
“Don’t worry.” He kissed her cheek—the passionless kiss-on-the-cheek-of cocktail-party acquaintances.
He was opening the kitchen door to go out when Regina asked, “Did you know the boy who was run down last night on Kennedy Drive?”
He turned back to look at her, his face expressionless. “What?”
“The paper said he went to Libertyville.
“Oh, the hit-and-run that’s what you’re talking about.”
“Yes.”
“I had a class with him when I was a freshman,” Arnie said. “I think. No, I really didn’t know him, Mom.”
“Oh.” She nodded, pleased. “That’s good. The paper said there were residues of drugs in his system. You’d never take drugs, would you, Arnie?”
Arnie smiled gently at her pallid, watchful face. “No, Mom,” he said.
“And if your back started to hurt you—I mean, if it really started to hurt you—you’d go see Dr Mascia about it, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t buy anything from a… a drug-pusher, would you?”
“No, Mom,” he repeated, and went out.
There had been more snow. Another thaw had melted most of it, but this time it had not disappeared completely; it had only withdrawn into the shadows, where it formed a white rime under hedges, the bases of trees, the overhang of the garage. But in spite of the snow around the edges—or maybe because of it—their lawn looked oddly green as Arnie stepped out into the twilight, and his father looked like a strange refugee from summer as he raked the last of the autumn leaves.
Arnie raised his hand briefly to his father and made as if to go past without speaking. Michael called him over. Arnie went reluctantly He didn’t want to be late for his bus.
His father had also aged in the storms that had blown up over Christine, although other things had undoubtedly played a part. He had made a bid for the chairmanship of the History Department at Horlicks late in the summer and had been rebuffed quite soundly. And during his annual October checkup, the doctor had pointed out an incipient phlebitis problem—phlebitis, which had nearly killed Nixon; phlebitis, an old folks” problem. As that late fall moved toward another grey western-Pennsylvania winter, Michael Cunningham looked gloomier than ever.
“Hi, Dad. Listen, I’ve got to hurry if I’m going to catch—”
Michael looked up from the little pile of frozen brown leaves he had managed to get together; the sunset caught the planes of his face and appeared to make them bleed. Arnie stepped back involuntarily, a little shocked. His father’s face was haggard.
