“There’s an outfit on North Broad Street, United Auto Parts. You think you could go by there and see what they’ve got for tyres?”
“Remoulds?” Arnie asked.
“First-lines.”
“Sure, I can go by. I’m free tomorrow afternoon from noon until three.”
“That’ll be fine. You ask for Roy Mustungerra, and mention my name.”
“Spell that.”
Will spelled it.
“That’s all?”
“Yeah… except I hope you get your ass whuped.”
“Fat chance,” Cunningham said, and laughed. Will told him goodbye and hung up.
It was Cunningham, no doubt about that. Cunningham was in Philadelphia tonight, and Philadelphia was almost three hundred miles away,
Who could he have given an extra set of keys to?
The Guilder kid.
Sure! Except the Guilder kid was in the hospital.
His girl.
But she didn’t have a driver’s licence or even a permit. Arnie had said so.
Someone else.
There was no one else. Cunningham wasn’t close to anyone else except for Will himself, and Will knew damned well Cunningham had never given him a dupe set of keys.
Like magic.
Shit.
Will leaned back in his chair again and lit another cigar. When it was going and the neatly clipped-off end was in his ashtray, he looked up at the raftering smoke and thought it over. Nothing came. Cunningham was in Philly and he had gone on the high school bus, but his car was gone. Jimmy Sykes had seen it pulling out, but Jimmy hadn’t seen who was driving it. Now just what did all of that mean? What did it add up to?
Gradually, his mind turned into other channels. He thought of his own high school days, when he had had the lead part in the senior play. His part had been that of the minister who is driven to suicide by his lust for Sadie Thompson, the girl he has set out to save. He had brought down the house. His one moment of glory in a high school career that had been devoid of sporting or academic triumphs, and maybe the high point of his youth—his father had been a drunk, his mother a drudge, his one brother a deadbeat with his own moment of glory coming somewhere in Germany, his only applause the steady pounding of German 88s.
He thought of his one girlfriend, a pallid blonde named Wanda Haskins, whose white cheeks had been splattered with freckles which grew painfully profuse in the August sun. They almost surely would have married —Wanda was one of four girls that Will Darnell had actually fucked (he excluded whores from his count). She was surely the only one he had ever loved (always assuming there was such a thing—and, like the supernatural events he had sometimes heard about but never witnessed, he could doubt its existence but not disprove it), but her father had been in the Army, and Wanda had been an Army brat. At the age of fifteen—perhaps only a year before the mystic shift in the balance of power from the hands of the old into those of the young—she and her family had moved to Wichita, and that had been the end of that.
There was a certain lipstick she had worn, and in that long-ago summer of 1934 it had tasted like fresh raspberries to a Will Darnell who was still quite slim and clear-eyed and ambitious and young. It had been a taste to make the left hand stray to the erect and enthusiastic root of the penis in the middle of the night… and even before Wanda Haskins consented, they had danced that sweet and special dance in Will Darnell’s dreams. In his narrow child’s bed that was too short for his growing legs, they had danced.
And, now thinking of this dance, Will ceased to think and began to dream and, ceasing to dream, began to dance again.
He awakened from a sleep that had never really deepened solidly some three hours later; he awoke to the sound of the big garage door rattling up and the inside light over the door—no fluorescent but a blaring 200-watt bulb—coming on.
Will tilted his chair down in a hurry. His shoes hit the mat under his desk (BARDAHL written across it in raised rubber letters), and it was the shock of pins and needles in his feet more than anything else that brought him awake.
Christine moved slowly across the garage towards stall twenty and slipped in.
Will, hardly convinced even now that he was awake, watched her with a curious lack of excitement which perhaps only belongs to those summoned directly from their dreams. He sat upright behind his desk, hamlike arms planted on his dirty, doodled-upon blotter, and watched her.
The engine raced once, twice. The bright new exhaust pipe shot blue smoke.
Then the motor shut down.
Will sat there, not moving.
His door was shut, but there was an intercom, always on, between the office and the long, barnlike garage area. It was the same intercom on which he had heard the beginnings of the Cunningham-Repperton title fight back in August. From the intercom’s speaker he now heard the steady tick of metal as the engine cooled. He heard nothing else.
No one got out of Christine, because there was no one in her to get out.
He put stuff like that in an open file because nothing really inexplicable had ever happened to him… except maybe something like that was happening now.
He had seen her cross the cement to stall twenty, the automatic door rattling shut against the cold December night behind her. And experts, examining the case later, could say: The witness had dozed and then fallen asleep, he admits that much, and that he was dreaming… what he claims to have seen was obviously nothing more or less than an extension of that dream, an outward stimulus causing a subjective range of spontaneous, dream-oriented imagery…
Yes, they could say that, just as Will could dream of dancing with fifteen-year-old Wanda Haskins… but the reality was a hard-headed man of sixty-one, a man who had long since jettisoned any last romantic notions.
And he had seen Cunningham’s ’58 glide across the garage empty, the steering wheel moving all by itself as the car slipped into her accustomed stall. He had seen the headlights go off, and he had heard the eight- cylinder engine as it died.
Now, feeling oddly boneless, Will Darnell got up, hesitated, went to the door of his office, hesitated again, and then opened it. He walked out and moved down the ranks of slant-parked cars to stall twenty. His footfalls echoed behind him and then died out in a mystery.
He stood beside the car with her rich two-tone body, red and white. The paint job was deep and clear and perfect, umarred by the smallest chip or the slightest touch of rust. The glass was clear and unbroken, not marked by so much as a nick caused by a random-flying pebble.
The only sound now was the slow drip of melting snow from the front and rear bumpers.
Will touched the hood. It was warm.
He tried the driver’s side door, and it opened freely. The smell that issued forth was the warm smell of new leather, new plastic, new chrome—except that there seemed to be another, more unpleasant smell beneath it. An earthy smell. Will breathed deep but could not place it. He thought briefly of old turnips in his father’s basement vegetable bin, and his nose wrinkled.
He leaned in. There were no keys in the ignition. The milometer read 52,107.8.
Suddenly the empty ignition slot set into the dashboard revolved, the black slit heeling over of its own accord past ACC to START. The hot engine caught at once and rumbled steadily, full of contented high-octane power.
Will’s heart staggered in his chest. His breath caught. Gasping and whooping noisily for breath, he hurried back to his office to find the spare aspirator in one of his desk drawers. His breath, thin and impotent, sounded like winter wind under an entryway door. His face was the colour of old candlewax. His fingers caught in the loose flesh of his throat and pulled restlessly.
Christine’s engine turned off again.
