“Just joking,” Will said, wishing again that Cunningham were here. You couldn’t talk to Jimmy except on a perfectly literal Dick-and-Jane level. Still, maybe he would invite him in for a cup of coffee with a slug of Courvoisier tipped in for good measure. Make it a threesome. Him, Jimmy, and the emphysema. Or maybe, since the emphysema had brought its brother tonight, you’d have to call it a foursome. “What do you say about—”
He broke off suddenly, noticing that stall twenty was empty. Christine was gone.
“Arnie come in?” he said.
“Arnie?” Jimmy repeated, blinkin stupidly.
“Arnie, Arnie Cunningham,” Will said impatiently. “How many Arnies do you know? His car’s gone.”
Jimmy looked around at stall twenty and frowned. “Oh. Yeah.”
Will smiled. “Hotshot got knocked out of his hotshot chess tournament, huh?”
“Oh, did he?” Jimmy asked. “Jeez, that’s too bad, huh?”
Will restrained an urge to grab Jimmy and give him a shake and a wallop. He would not get angry; that only made it harder to breathe, and he would end up having to shoot his lungs full of the horrible-tasting stuff from his aspirator. “Well, what did he say, Jimmy? What did he say when you saw him?” But Will knew suddenly and surely that Jimmy hadn’t seen Arnie.
Jimmy finally understood what Will was driving at. “Oh, I didn’t see him. Just saw Christine go out the door, you know. Boy, that’s some pretty car, ain’t it? He fixed it up like magic.”
“Yes,” Will said. “Like magic.” It was a word that had occurred to him in connection with Christine before. He suddenly changed his mind about inviting Jimmy in for coffee and brandy. Still looking at stall twenty, he said, “You can go home now, Jimmy.”
“Aw, jeez, Mr Darnell, you said I could have six hours tonight. That ain’t over until ten.”
“I’ll punch you out at ten.
Jimmy’s muddy eyes brightened at this unexpected, almost unheard-of largesse. “Really?”
“Yeah, really, really. Make like a tree and leave, Jimmy, okay?”
“Sure,” Jimmy said, thinking that for the first time in the five or six years he had worked for Will (he had trouble remembering which it was, although his mother kept track of it, the same as she kept track of all his tax papers), the old grouch had gotten the Christmas spirit. Just like in that movie about the three ghosts. Summoning up his own Christmas spirit, Jimmy cried: “That’s a big ten-four, good buddy!”
Will winced and lumbered into his office. He turned on the Mr Coffee and sat down behind his desk, watching as Jimmy put away his broom, turned out most of the overhead fluorescents, and got his heavy coat.
Will leaned back and thought.
It was, after all, his brains that had kept him alive all these years, alive and one step ahead; he had never been handsome, he had been fat all of his adult life, and his health had always been terrible. A childhood bout of scarlet fever one spring had been followed by a mild case of polio; he had been left with a right arm that operated at only about seventy per cent capacity. As a young man he had endured a plague of boils. When Will was forty- three his doctor had discovered a large, spongy growth under one arm. It had turned out to be non-malignant, but the removal surgery had kept him on his back most of one summer, and as a result he had developed bedsores. A year later he had almost died of double pneumonia. Now it was incipient diabetes and emphysema. But his brains had always been fine and dandy, and his brains had kept him one step ahead.
So he leaned back and thought about Arnie. He supposed one of the things that had favourably impressed him about Cunningham after he had stood up to Repperton that day was a certain similarity to the long-ago teenaged Will Darnell. Of course, Cunningham wasn’t sickly, but he had been pimply, disliked, a loner. Those things had all been true of the young Will Darnell.
Cunningham had brains, too.
Brains and that car. That strange car.
“Good night, Mr Darnell,” Jimmy called. He stood by the door for a moment, and then added uncertainly, “Merry Christmas.”
Will raised his hand in a wave. Jimmy left. Will heaved his bulk out of his chair, got the bottle of Courvoisier out of the filing cabinet, and set it down next to the Mr Coffee. Then he sat down again. A rough chronology was ticking through his mind.
August: Cunningham brings in an old wreck of a ’58 Plymouth and parks it in stall twenty. It looks familiar, and it should. It’s Rollie LeBay’s Plymouth. And Arnie doesn’t know it—he has no need to know—but once upon a time Rollie LeBay also made an occasional run to Albany or Burlington or Portsmouth for Will Darnell… only in those dim dead days, Will had a ’54 Cadillac. Different transport cars, same false-bottom boot with the hidden compartment for fireworks, cigarettes, booze, and pot. In those days Will had never heard of cocaine. He supposed no one but jazz musicians in New York had.
Late August: Repperton and Cunningham get into it, and Darnell kicks Repperton out. He’s tired of Repperton, the constant braggadocio, the cock-of-the-walk manner. He’s hurting custom, and while he’ll make all the runs into New York and New England that Will wants, he’s careless, and carelessness is dangerous. He has a tendency to exceed the double-nickel speed limit, he’s gotten speeding tickets. All it would take is one nosy cop to put them all in court. Darnell isn’t afraid of going to jail—not in Libertyville but it would look bad. There was a time when he didn’t care much how things looked, but he’s older now.
Will got up, poured coffee, and tipped in a capful of brandy. He paused, thought it over, and tipped in a second capful. He sat down, took a cigar out of his breast pocket, looked at it, and lit it. Fuck you, emphysema. Take this.
Fragrant smoke rising around him, good hot coffee laced with brandy before him, Darnell stared out into his shadowy, silent garage and thought some more.
September: The kid asks him to jump an inspection sticker and loan him a dealer plate so he can take his girl to a football game. Darnell does it—hell, there was a day when he used to sell inspection stickers for seven dollars and never even look at the car it was going on. Besides, the kid’s car is looking good. A little rough, maybe, and it’s still more than a little noisy, but all in all, pretty damn good. He’s going a real job of restoration.
And that’s pretty damn strange, isn’t it, when you consider that no one has ever seen him really work on it.
Oh, little things, sure. Replacing bulbs in the parking lights. Changing tyres. The kid is no dummy about cars: Will sat right in this chair one day and watched him replace the upholstery in the back seat. But no one has seen him working on the car’s exhaust system, which was totally shot when he wheeled the ’58 in here for the first time late last summer. And no one has seen him doing any bodywork, either, although the Fury’s bod, which had an advanced case of cancer when the kid brought it in, now looks cherry.
Darnell knew what Jimmy Sykes thought, because he had asked him once. Jimmy thought Arnie did the serious work at night, after everyone was gone.
“That’s one hell of a lot of night work,” Darnell said aloud, and felt a sudden chill that not even the brandy- laced coffee could dispel, A lot of night work, yeah. It must have been. Because what the kid seemed to be doing days was listening to the greaser music on WDIL. That, and a lot of aimless fooling around.
“I guess he does the big stuff at night,” Jimmy had said, with all the guileless faith of a child explaining how Santa Claus gets down the chimney or how the tooth fairy put the quarter under his pillow. Will didn’t believe in either Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, and he didn’t believe that Arnie had restored Christine at night, either.
Two other facts rolled around uneasily in his mind like poolballs looking for a pocket in which to come to rest.
He knew that Cunningham had been driving the car around out back a lot before it was street-legal, that was one thing. Just cruising slowly up and down the narrow lanes between the thousands of junked cars in the block-long back lot. Driving at five miles an hour, around and around after dark, after everyone had gone home, circling the big crane with the round electromagnet and the great box of the car-crusher. Cruising. The one time Darnell asked him about it, Arnie had told him he was checking out a shimmy in the front end. But the kid couldn’t lie for shit. No one ever checked out a shimmy at five miles an hour.
That was what Cunningham did after everyone else went home. That had been his night work. Cruising out back, threading his way in and out of the junkets, headlights flickering unsteadily in their rust-eaten sockets.
Then there was the Plymouth’s milometer. It ran backward. Cunningham had pointed that out to him with a sly little smile. It ran backward at an extremely fast rate. He told Will that he figured the milometer turned back
