her blue flannel nightgown.
“Honey, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Leigh sobbed.
I almost choked to death, I smelled something that might have come from a freshly opened tomb, and I think… yes, I think that somehow that car is alive… more alive every day. I think it’s like some kind of horrible vampire, only it’s taking Arnie’s mind to feed itself. His mind and his spirit.
“Nothing, nothing’s wrong, I had a fight with Arnie, that’s all. Help me pick up my things, would you?”
They picked up Leigh’s parcels and went in. The door shut behind them and the night belonged to the wind and to the swiftly falling snow. By morning there would be better than eight inches.
Arnie cruised until sometime after midnight, and later had no memory of it. The snow had filled the streets; they were deserted and ghostly. It was not a night for the great American motor-car. Nevertheless, Christine moved through the deepening storm with surefooted ease, even without snow tyres. Now and then the prehistoric shape of a snowplough loomed and was gone.
The radio played. It was WDIL all the way across the dial. The news came on. Eisenhower had predicted, at the AFL–CIO convention, a future of labour and management marching harmoniously into the future together. Dave Beck had denied that the Teamsters Union was a front for the rackets. Rock “n roller Eddie Cochran had been killed in a car crash while en route to London’s Heathrow Airport: three hours of emergency surgery had failed to save his life. The Russians were rattling their ICBMS. WDIL played the oldies all week long, but on the weekends they really got dedicated. Fifties newscasts, wow. That was
(never heard anything like that before) a really neat idea. That was
(totally insane) pretty neat.
The weather promised more snow.
Then music again: Bobby Darin singing “Splish-Splash”, Ernie K-Doe singing “Mother-in-Law”, the Kalin twins singing “When”. The wipers beat time.
He looked to his right, and Roland D. LeBay was riding shotgun.
Roland D. LeBay sat there in his green pants and a faded shirt of Army twill, looking out of dark eyesockets. A beetle sat, preening, within one.
You have to make them pay, Roland D. LeBay said. You have to make the shitters pay, Cunningham. Every last fucking one of them.
“Yes,” Arnie whispered. Christine hummed through the night, cutting the snow with fresh, sure tracks. “Yes, that’s a fact.” And the wipers nodded back and forth.
35
NOW THIS BRIEF INTERLUDE
Drive that old Chrysler to Mexico, boy.
At Libertyville High, Coach Puffer bad given way to Coach Jones, and football had given way to basketball. But nothing really changed: the LHS cagers didn’t do much better than the LHS gridiron warriors—the only bright spot was Lenny Barongg, a three-sport man whose major one was basketball. Lenny stubbornly went about having the great year he needed to get the athletic scholarship to Marquette that he lusted after.
Sandy Galton suddenly blew town. One day he was there, the next he was gone. His mother, a fortv-five- year old wino who didn’t look a day over sixty, did not seem terribly concerned. Neither did his younger brother, who pushed more dope than any other kid in Gornick Junior High. A romantic rumour that he had cut out for Mexico made the rounds at Libertyville High. Another, less romantic, rumour also made the rounds: that Buddy Repperton had been on Sandy about something and he felt it would be safer to make himself scarce.
The Christmas break approached and the school’s atmosphere grew restless and rather thundery, as it always did before a long vacation. The student body’s overall grade average took its customary pre-Christmas dip. Book reports were turned in late and often bore a suspicious resemblance to jacket copy (after all, how many sophomore English students are apt to call The Catcher in the Rye “this burning classic of postwar adolescence'?). Class projects were left half done or undone, the percentage of detention periods given for kissing and petting in the halls skyrocketed, and busts for marijuana went way up as the Libertyville High School students indulged in a little pre-Christmas cheer. So a good many of the students were up; teacher absenteeism was up; in the hallways and homerooms, Christmas decorations were up.
Leigh Cabot was not up. She flunked an exam for the first time in her high school career and got a D on an executive typing drill. She could not seem to study, she found her mind wandering back, again and again, to Christine—to the green dashboard instruments that had become hateful, gloating cat’s-eyes, watching her choke to death.
But for most, the last week of school before the Christmas break was a mellow period when offences which would have earned detention slips at other times of the year were excused, when hard-hearted teachers would sometimes actually throw a scale on an exam where everyone had done badly, when girls who had been bitter enemies made it up, and when boys who had scuffled repeatedly over real or imagined insults did the same. Perhaps more indicative of the mellow season than anything else was the fact that Miss Rat-Pack, the gorgon of Room 23 study hall, was seen to smile… not just once, but several times.
In the hospital, Dennis Guilder was moderately up—he had swapped his bedfast traction casts for walking casts. Physical therapy was no longer the torture it had been. He swung through corridors that had been strung with tinsel and decorated with first-, second-, and third-grade Christmas pictures, his crutches thump-thumping along, sometimes in time to the carols spilling merrily from the overhead speakers.
It was a caesura, a lull, an interlude, a period of quiet. During his seemingly endless walks up and down the hospital corridors, Dennis reflected that things could be worse—much, much worse.
Before too long, they were.
36
BUDDY AND CHRISTINE
Well it’s out there in the distance
And it’s creeping up on me
I ain’t got no resistance
Ain’t nothing gonna set me free.
Even a man with one eye could see
Something bad is gonna happen to me…
On Tuesday, December 12, the Terriers lost to the Buccaneers 54–48 in the Libertyville High gym. Most of the fans went out into the still black cold of the night not too disappointed: every sportswriter in the Pittsburgh area had predicted another loss for the Terriers. The result could hardly be called an upset. And there was Lenny Barongg for the Terriers fans to be proud of: he scored a mind-boggling 34 points all by himself, setting a new school record.
Buddy Repperton, however, was disappointed.
Because he was, Richie Trelawney was also at great pains to be disappointed. So was Bobby Stanton in the back seat.
In the few months since he had been ushered out of LHS, Buddy seemed to have aged. Part of it was the
