“Well, I can dig that. But—”
“No,” he said quietly. “You can’t dig it. You might think you can, but you can’t. Not really. But you like me, Dennis—”
“I love you, man,” I said. “You know that.”
“Maybe you do,” he said. “And I appreciate it. if you do you know it’s because there’s something else— something underneath the zits and my stupid face—”
“Your face isn’t stupid,” Arnie,” I said. “Queer-looking, maybe, but not “stupid.”
“Fuck you,” he said, smiling.
“And de cayuse you rode in on, Range Rider.”
“Anyway, that car’s like that. There’s something underneath. Something else. Something better. I see it, that’s all.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah, Dennis,” he said quietly. “I do.”
I turned onto Main Street. We were getting close to LeBay’s now. And suddenly I had a truly nasty idea. Suppose Arnie’s father had gotten one of his friends or students to beat his feet over to LeBay’s house and buy that car out from under his son? A touch Machiavellian, you might say, but Michael Cunningham’s mind was more than a little devious. His specialty was military history.
“I saw that car—and I felt such an attraction to it… I can’t explain it very well even to myself. But…”
He trailed off, those grey eyes looking dreamily ahead.
“But I saw I could make her better,” he said.
“Fix it up, you mean?”
“Yeah… well, no. That’s too impersonal. You fix tables, chairs, stuff like that. The lawnmower when it won’t start. And ordinary cars.”
Maybe he saw my eyebrows go up. He laughed, anyway—a little defensive laugh.
“Yeah, I know how that sounds,” he said. “I don’t even like to say it, because I know how it sounds. But you’re a friend, Dennis. And that means a minimum of bullshit. I don’t think she’s any ordinary car. I don’t know why I think that… but I do.”
I opened my mouth to say something I might later have regretted, something about trying to keep things in perspective or maybe even about avoiding obsessive behaviour. But just then we swung around the corner and onto LeBay’s street.
Arnie pulled air into his lungs in a harsh, hurt gasp.
There was a rectangle of grass on LeBay’s lawn that was even yellower, balder, and uglier than the rest of his lawn. Near one end of that patch there was a diseased-looking oil-spill that had sunk into the ground and killed everything that had once grown there. That rectangular piece of ground was so fucking gross I almost believe that if you looked at it for too long you’d go blind.
It was where the ’58 Plymouth had been standing yesterday.
The ground was still there but the Plymouth was” gone.
“Arnie,” I said as I swung my car in to the kerb, “take it easy. Don’t go off half-cocked, for Christ’s sake.”
He paid not a bit of attention. I doubt if he had even heard me. His face had gone pale. The blemishes covering it stood out in purplish, glaring relief. He had the passenger door of my Duster open and was lunging out of the car even before it had stopped moving.
“Arnie—”
“It’s my father,” he said in anger and dismay. “I smell that bastard all over this.”
And he was gone, running across the lawn to LeBay’s door.
I got out and hurried after him, thinking that this crazy shit was never going to end. I could hardly believe I had just heard Arnie Cunningham call Michael a bastard.
Arnie was raising his fist to hammer on the door when it opened. There stood Roland D. LeBay himself. Today he was wearing a shirt over his back brace. He looked at Arnie’s furious face with a benignly avaricious smile.
“Hello, son,” he said.
“Where is she?” Arnie raged. “We had a deal! Dammit we had a deal! I’ve got a receipt!”
“Simmer down,” LeBay said. He saw me, standing on the bottom step with my hands shoved down in my pockets. “What’s wrong with your friend, son?”
“The car’s gone,” I said. “That’s what’s wrong with him.”
“Who bought it?” Arnie shouted. I’d never seen him so mad. If he had had a gun right then, I believe he would have put it to LeBay’s temple. I was fascinated in spite of myself. It was as if a rabbit had suddenly turned carnivore. God help me, I even wondered fleetingly if he might not have a brain tumour.
“Who bought it?” LeBay repeated mildly. “Why nobody has yet”, son. But you got a lien on her. I backed her into the garage, that’s all. I put on the spare and changed the oil.” He preened and then offered us both an absurdly magnanimous smile.
“You’re a real sport,” I said.
Arnie stared at him uncertainly, then turned his head creakily to took at the closed door of the modest one-car garage that was attached to the house by a breezeway. The breezeway, like everything else around LeBay’s place, had seen better days.
“Besides, I didn’t want to leave her out once you’d laid some money down on her,” he said. “I’ve had some trouble with one or two of the folks on this street. One night some kid threw a rock at my car. Oh yeah, I got some neighbours straight out of the old AB.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The Asshole Brigade, son.”
He swept the far side of the street with a baleful sniper’s glance, taking in the neat, gas-thrifty commuters cars now home from work, the children playing tag and jumprope, the people sitting out on their porches and having drinks in the first of the evening cool.
“I’d like to know who it was threw that rock,” he said softly. “Yessir, I’d surely like to know who it was.”
Arnie cleared his throat. “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time.”
“Don’t worry,” LeBay said bridkly. “Like to see a fellow stand up for what’s his… or what’s almost his. You bring the money, kid?”
“Yes, I have it.”
“Well, come on in the house. You and your friend both. I’ll sign her over to you, and we’ll have a glass of beer to celebrate.”
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll stay out here, if that’s okay.”
“Suit yourself, son,” LeBay said… and winked. To this day I have no idea exactly what that wink was supposed to mean. They went in, and the door banged shut behind them. The fish had been netted and was about to be cleaned.
Feeling depressed, I walked through the breezeway to the garage and tried the door. It ran up easily and exhaled the same odours I had smelled when I opened the Plymouth’s door yesterday—oil, old upholstery, the accumulated heat of a long summer.
Rakes and a few old garden implements were ranked along one wall. On the other was a very old hose, a bicycle pump, and an ancient golf-bag filled with rusty clubs. In the centre, nose outward, sat Arnie’s car, Christine, looking a mile long in this day and age when even Cadillacs look squeezed together and boxy. The spiderweb snarl of cracks at the side of the windscreen caught the light and turned it to a dull quicksilver. Some kid with a rock, as LeBay had said—or maybe a little accident coming home from the VFW hall after a night of drinking boilermakers and telling stories about the Battle of the Bulge or Pork Chop Hill. The good old days, when a man could see Europe, the Pacific, and the mysterious East from behind the sight of a bazooka. Who knew… and what did it matter'? Either way, it was not going to be easy, finding a replacement for a big wrap windscreen like that.
Or cheap.
Oh, Arnie, I thought. Man, you are getting in so deep.
