No sound now but the tick and click of cooling metal.
Will found his aspirator, plunged it deep into his throat, depressed the trigger, and inhaled. Little by little, the feeling that a wheelbarrowful of cinderblocks was sitting on his chest dissipated. He sat down in the swivel chair and listened gratefully to the sane and expected creak of protest from its springs. He covered his face momentarily with his fat hands.
Nothing really inexplicable… until now.
He had seen it.
Nothing had been driving that car. It had come in empty, smelling of something like rotting turnips.
And even then, in spite of his dread, Will’s mind began to turn and he began wondering how he could put what he knew to his own advantage.
38
BREAKING CONNECTIONS
Well mister, I want a yellow convertible,
Four-door DeVille,
With a Continental spare and wire-chrome wheels.
I want power steering,
And power brakes;
I want a powerful motor with a jet offtake…
I want shortwave radio,
I want TV and a phone,
You know I gotta talk to my baby
When I’m ridin along.
The burned out wreck of Buddy Repperton’s Camaro was found late on Wednesday afternoon by a park ranger. An old lady who lived with her husband in the tiny town of Upper Squantic had called the ranger station on the lake side of the park. She was badly afflicted with arthritis, and sometimes she couldn’t sleep. Last night she thought she had seen flames coming from near the park’s south gate. At what time? She reckoned it to be around quarter past ten, because she had been watching the Tuesday Night Movie on CBS and it hadn’t been but half over.
On Thursday, a newsphoto of the burned car appeared on the front page of the Libertyville Keystone under a headline which read: THREE KILLED IN CAR CRASH AT SQUANTIC HILLS STATE PARK. A State Police source was quoted as saying “liquor had probably been a factor'—an officially opaque way of saying that the shattered remains of over half a dozen bottles of a juice-and-wine combination sold under the trade name Texas Driver had been found in the wreckage.
The news struck particularly hard at Libertyville High School; the young always have the greatest difficulty accepting unpleasant intelligence of their own mortality. Perhaps the holiday season made it that much harder.
Arnie Cunningham found himself terribly depressed by the news, Depressed and frightened. First Moochie; now Buddy, Richie Trelawney, and Bobby Stanton. Bobby Stanton, a dipshit little freshman Arnie had never even heard of—what had a dipshit little kid like that been doing with the likes of Buddy Repperton and Richie Trelawney anyway? Didn’t he know that was like going into a den of tigers with nothing for protection but a squirt gun. He found it unaccountably hard to accept the grapevine version, which was simply that Buddy and his friends had gotten pretty well squiffed at the basketball game, and gone out cruising and drinking, and had come to a bad end.
He couldn’t quite lose the feeling he was somehow involved.
Leigh had stopped talking to him since the argument. Arnie didn’t call her—partly out of pride, partly out of shame, partly out of a wish that she would call him first and things could go back to what they had been… before.
Before what? his mind whispered. Well, before she almost choked to death in your car, for one thing. Before you tried to punch out the guy who saved her life.
But she wanted him to sell Christine. And that was simply impossible… wasn’t it? How could he do that after he had put so much time and effort and blood and—yes, it was true—even tears into it?
It was an old rap, and he didn’t want to think about it. The final bell rang on that seemingly endless Thursday, and he went out to the student parking lot—almost ran out and nearly dived into Christine.
He sat there behind the wheel and drew a long, shuddering breath, watching the first snowflakes of an afternoon flurry twist and skirl across the bright bonnet. He dug for his keys, pulled them out of his pocket, and started Christine up. The motor hummed confidently and he pulled out, tyres rolling and cruching over the packed snow. He would have to put snow tyres on eventually, he supposed, but the truth was, Christine didn’t seem to need them. She had the best traction of any car he had ever driven.
He felt for the radio knob and turned on WDIL. Sheb Wooley was singing “The Purple People Eater.” That raised a smile on his face at last.
Just being behind Christine’s wheel, in control, made everything seem better. It made everything seem manageable. Hearing about Repperton and Trelawney and the little shitter stepping out that way had been a terrible shock, naturally, and after the hard feelings of the late summer and this fall, it was probably natural enough for him to feel a little guilty. But the simple truth was, he had been in Philly. He hadn’t had anything to do with it; it was impossible.
He had just been feeling low about things in general. Dennis was in the hospital. Leigh was behaving stupidly as if his car had grown hands and jammed that piece of hamburger down her throat, for Christ’s sake. And he had quit the chess club today.
Maybe the worst part of that had been the way Mr Slawson, the faculty advisor, had accepted his decision without even trying to change his mind, Arnie had given him a lot of guff about how little time he had these days, and how he was simply going to have to cut back on some of his activities, and Mr Slawson had simply nodded and said, Okay, Arnie, we’ll be right here in Room 30 if you change your mind. Mr Slawson had looked at him with his faded blue eyes that his thick glasses magnified to the size of repulsive boiled eggs, and there had been something in them—was it reproach?
Maybe it had been. But the guy hadn’t even tried to persuade him to stay, that was the thing. He should have at least tried, because Arnie was the best the LHS chess club had to offer, and Slawson knew it. If he had tried, maybe Arnie would have changed his mind. The truth was, he did have a little more time now that Christine was… was… What?
… well, fixed up again. If Mr Slawson had said something like Hey Arnie, don’t be so rash, let’s think this over, we could really use you… if Mr Slawson had said something like that, why, he might have reconsidered. But not Slawson. Just we’ll be right here in Room 30 if you change your mind, and blah-blah and yak-yak, what a fucking shitter, just like the rest of them. It wasn’t his fault that LHS had been knocked out in the semi-final round; he had won four games before that and would have won in the finals if he had gotten a chance. It was those two shitters Barry Qualson and Mike Hicks that had lost it for them; both of them played chess as if maybe they thought Ruy Lopex was some new kind of soft drink or something…
He stripped the wrapper and the foil from a stick of gum, folded the gum into his mouth, balled the wrapper, and flicked it into the litterbag hanging from Christine’s ashtray with neat accuracy, “Right up the little tramp’s ass,” he muttered, and then grinned. It was a hard, spitless grin. Above it, his eyes moved restlessly from side to side, looking mistrustfully out at a world full of crazy drivers and stupid pedestrians and general idiocy.
Arnie cruised aimlessly around Libertyville, his thoughts continuing to run on in this softly paranoid and bitterly comforting fashion. The radio spilled out a steady flood of golden oldies, and today all of them seemed to be instrumentals—’rebel Rouser”, “Wild Weekend”, “Telstar”, Sandy Nelson’s jungle-driven “Teen Beat”, and
