“I never would have believed it,” she said as they drove out of the ice-cream parlour’s small parking lot and joined the flow of traffic beaded toward the Monroeville Mall. “You must have worked like a dog.”
“It wasn’t as bad as it probably looked to you,” Arnie said. “Mind some music?”
“No, of course not.”
Arnie turned on the radio—The Silhouettes were kip-kipping and boom-booming through “Get a Job.” Leigh made a face. “DIL, yuck. Can I change it?”
“Be my guest.”
Leigh switched it to a Pittsburgh rock station and got Billy Joel. “You may be right,” Billy admitted cheerfully, “I may be crazy.” This was followed by Billy telling his girl Virginia that Catholic girls started much too late—it was the Block Party Weekend. Now, Arnie thought. Now she’ll start to hitch… back off… something. But Christine only went rolling along.
The mall was thronged with hectic but mostly good-natured shoppers; the last frantic and sometimes ugly Christmas rush was better than two weeks off. The Yuletide spirit was still new enough to be novel, and it was possible to look at the tinsel strung through the wide mall hallways without feeling sour and Ebenezer Scroogey. The steady ringing of the Salvation Army Santas” bells had not yet become a guilty annoyance; they still chanted good tidings and good will rather than the monotonous, metallic chant of The poor have no Christmas the poor have no Christmas the poor have no Christmas that Arnie always seemed to hear as the day grew closer and both the shopgirls and the Salvation Army Santas grew more harried and hollow-eyed.
They held hands until the parcels grew too many for that, and then Arnie complained goodnaturedly about how she was turning him into her beast of burden. As they were going down to the lower level and B. Dalton, where Arnie wanted to look for a book on toy-making for Dennis Guilder’s old man, Leigh noticed that it had begun to snow. They stood for a moment at the window of the glassed-in stairwell, looking out like children. Arnie took her hand and Leigh looked at him, smiling. He could smell her skin, clean and a bit soapy; he could smell the fragrance of her hair. He moved his head forward a bit; she moved hers a bit toward him. They kissed lightly and she squeezed his hand. Later, after the bookstore, they stood above the rink in the centre of the mall, watching the skaters as they dipped and pirouetted and swooped to the sound of Christmas carols.
It was a very good day right up until the moment that Leigh Cabot almost died.
She almost surely would have died, if not for the hitchhiker.
They had been on their way back then, and an early December twilight had long since turned to snowy dark. Christine, surefooted as usual, purred easily through the four inches of fresh light powder.
Arnie had made a reservation for an early dinner at the British Lion Steak House, Libertyville’s only really good restaurant, but the time had gotten away from them and they had agreed on a quick to-go meal from the McDonald’s on JFK Drive. Leigh had promised her mother she would be in by eight-thirty because the Cabots were having friends in” and it had been quarter of eight when they left the mall.
“Just as well,” Arnie said. “I’m damn near broke anyway.”
The headlights picked out the hitchhiker standing at the intersection of Route 17 and JFK Drive, still five miles outside of Libertyville. His black hair was shoulder-length, speckled with snow, and there was a duffel-bag between his feet.
As they approached him, the hitchhiker held up a sign painted with Day-Glo letters It read: LIBERTYVILLE, PA. As they drew closer, he flipped it over. The other side read: NON-PSYCHO COLLEGE STUDENT.
Leigh burst out laughing. “Let’s give him a ride, Arnie.” Arnie said, “When they go out of their way to advertise their non-psychotic status, that’s when you got to look out. But okay.” He pulled over. That evening he would have tried to catch the moon in a bushel basket if Leigh had asked him to give it a shot.
Christine rolled smoothly to the verge of the road, tyres barely slipping. But as they stopped, static blared across the radio, which had been playing some hard rock tune, and when the static cleared, there was the Big Bopper, singing “Chantilly Lace”.
“What happened to the Block Party Weekend?” Leigh asked as the hitchhiker ran toward them.
“I don’t know,” Arnie said, but he knew. It had happened before. Sometimes all that Christine’s radio would pick up was WDIL. It didn’t matter what buttons you pushed or how much you fooled with the FM converter tinder the dashboard; it was WDIL or nothing.
He suddenly felt that stopping for the hitchhiker had been a mistake.
But it was too late for second thoughts now; the fellow had opened one of Christine’s rear doors, tossed his duffel-bag onto the floor, and slipped in after it. A blast of cold air and a swirl of snow came in with him.
“Ah, man, thanks.” He sighed. “My fingers and toes all took off for Miami Beach about twenty minutes ago. They must have gone somewhere, anyway cause I sure can’t feel em anymore.”
“Thank my lady,” Arnie said shortly.
“Thank you, ma’am,” the hitchhiker said, tipping an invisible hat gallantly.
“Don’t mention it,” Leigh said, and smiled. “Merry Christmas.”
“Same to you,” the hitchhiker said, “although you’d never know there was such a thing if you’d been standing out there trying to hook a ride tonight. People just breeze by and then they’re gone. Voom.” He looked around appreciatively. “Nice car, man. Hell of a nice car.”
“Thanks,” Arnie said.
“You restore it yourself?”
“Yeah.”
Leigh was looking at Arnie, puzzled. His earlier expansive mood had been replaced by a curtness that was not like his usual self at all. On the radio, the Big Bopper finished and Richie Valens came on, doing “La Bamba”.
The hitchhiker shook his head and laughed. “First the Big Bopper, then Richie Valens. Must be death night on the radio. Good old WDIL.”
“What do you mean?” Leigh asked.
Arnie snapped the radio off. “They died in a plane crash. With Buddy Holly.”
“Oh,” Leigh said in a small voice.
Perhaps the hitchhiker also sensed the change in Arnie’s mood; he fell silent and meditative in the back seat. Outside, the snow began to fall faster and harder. The first good storm of the season had come in.
At length, the golden arches twinkled up out of the snow.
“Do you want me to go in, Arnie?” Leigh asked. Arnie had gone nearly as quiet as stone, turning aside her bright attempts at conversation with mere grunts.
“I will,” he said, and pulled in. “What do you want?” “Just a hamburger and french fries, please.” She had intended to go the whole hog—Big Mac, shake, even the cookies—but her appetite seemed to have shrunk away to nothing.
Arnie parked. In the yellow light flaring from the squat brick building’s undersides, his face looked jaundiced and somehow diseased. He turned around, arm trailing over the seat. “Can I grab you something?”
“No thanks,” the hitchhiker said. “Folks’ll be waiting supper. Can’t disappoint my mom. She kills the fatted calf every time I come h—”
The chunk of door cut off his final word. Arnie had gotten out and was headed briskly across to the IN door, his boots kicking up little puffs of new snow.
“Is he always that cheery?” the hitchhiker asked “Or does he get sorta taciturn sometimes?”
“He’s very sweet,” Leigh said firmly. She was suddenly nervous. Arnie had turned off the engine and taken the keys, and she was left alone with this stranger in the back seat. She could see him in the rearview mirror, and suddenly his long black hair, tangled by the wind, his scruff of beard, and his dark eyes made him seem Manson- like and wild.
“Where do you go to school?” she asked. Her fingers were plucking at her slacks, and she made them stop.
“Pitt,” the hitchhiker said, and no more. His eyes met hers in the mirror, and Leigh dropped hers hastily to her lap. Cranberry red slacks. She had worn them because Arnie had once told her he liked them—probably because they were the tightest pair she owned, even tighter than her Levi’s. She suddenly wished she had worn something else, something that could be considered provocative by no stretch of the imagination: a grain-sack, maybe. She tried to smile—it was a funny thought, all right, a grain-sack, get it, ha-ha-ho-ho, wotta knee- slapper—but no smile came. There was no way she could keep from admitting it to herself: Arnie had left her
