Christine

Clunk. Will was put on hold. He cocked himself back on his swivel chair and sat that way for what seemed to be a very long time, although the red second-hand on the office clock only revolved once. He won’t be there, and if he is, I’ll eat my—

“Hello?”

The voice was young, warily cautious and unmistakably Cunningham’s. Will Darnell felt a peculiar lift-drop in his belly, but none of it showed in his voice; he was much too old for that.

“Hi, Cunningham,” he said. “Darnell.”

“Yeah.”

“What are you up to, Will'?”

“How you doing, kid?”

“Won yesterday and drew today. Bullshit game. Couldn’t seem to keep my mind on it. What’s up?”

Yes, it was Cunningham—him without a doubt.

Will, who would no more call someone without a cover story than he would go out without his skivvies on, said smoothly, “You got a pencil, kiddo?”

“Sure.”

“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.