Christine

Arnie sat in the living room watching a football playoff doubleheader, not knowing who was playing, not caring, content to watch the players run around, first in bright warm California sunshine, later in a mixture of rain and sleet that turned the playing field to churned-up mud and erased the lines.

Around six o’clock he dozed off.

And dreamed.

He dreamed again that night and the next, in the bed where he had slept since earliest childhood, the elm outside casting its old familiar shadow (a skeleton each winter that gained miraculous new flesh each May). These dreams were not like the dream of the giant Will looming over the slotcar track. He could not remember these dreams at all more than a few moments after waking. Perhaps that was just as well. A figure by the roadside; a fleshless finger tapping a decayed palm in a lunatic parody of instruction; an uneasy sense of freedom and… escape? Yes, escape. Nothing else except…

Yes, he escaped from these dreams and back into reality with one repeating image: he was behind the wheel of Christine, driving slowly through a howling blizzard, snow so thick that he could literally see no farther than the end of her hood. The wind was not a scream; it was a lower, more sinister sound a basso roar. Then the image had changed. The snow wasn’t snow any longer; it was tickertape. The roar of the wind was the roar of a great crowd lining both sides of Fifth Avenue. They were cheering him. They were cheering Christine. They were cheering because he and Christine had… had…

Escaped.

Each time this confused dream retreated, he thought, When this is over I’m getting out. Getting out for sure. Going to drive to Mexico. And Mexico, as he imagined its steady sun and its rural quiet, seemed more real than the dreams.

Shortly after awakening from the last of these dreams, the idea of spending Christmas with Aunt Vicky and Uncle Steve, just like in the old days, had come to him. He awoke with it, and it clanged in his head with a peculiar persistence. The idea seemed to be an awfully good one, an all-important one. To get out of Libertyville before…

Well, before Christmas. What else?

So he began talking to his mother and father about it, coming down particularly hard on Regina. On Wednesday, she abruptly gave in and agreed. He knew she had talked to Vicky, and Vicky hadn’t been inclined to lord it over her, so it was all right.

Now, on Christmas Eve, he felt that everything would soon be all right.

“There it is, Mike,” Regina said, “and you’re going to drive right by it, just like you do every time we come here.”

Michael grunted and turned into the driveway. “I saw it,” he said in the perpetually defensive tone he always seemed to use around his wife. He’s a donkey, Arnie thought. She talks to him like a donkey, she rides him like a donkey, and he brays like a donkey.

“You’re smiling again,” Regina said.

“I was just thinking about how much I love you both,” Arnie said. His father looked at him, surprised and touched; there was a soft gleam in his mother’s eyes that might have been tears.

They really believed it.

The shitters.

By three o’clock that Christmas Eve the snow was still only isolated flurries, although the flurries were beginning to blend into each other. The delay in the storm’s arrival was not good news, the weather forecasters said. It had compacted itself and turned even more vicious. Predictions of possible accumulations had gone from a foot to a possible eighteen inches, with serious drifting in high winds.

Leigh Cabot sat in the living room of her house, across from a small natural Christmas tree that was already beginning to shed its needles (in her house she was the voice of traditionalism and for four years had successfully staved off her father’s wish for a synthetic tree and her mother’s wish to kick off the holiday season with a goose or a capon. instead of the traditional Thanksgiving turkey). She was alone in the house. Her mother and father had gone over to the Stewarts for Christmas Eve drinks; Mr Stewart was her father’s new boss, and they liked each other. This was a friendship Mrs Cabot was eager to promote. In the last ten years they had moved six times, hopping all over the eastern seaboard, and of all the places they had been, her mom liked Libertyville the best. She wanted to stay here, and her husband’s friendship with Mr Stewart could go a long way toward ensuring that.

All alone and still a virgin, she thought. That was an utterly stupid thing to think, but all the same she got up suddenly, as if stung. She went into the kitchen, over-conscious of that Formica wonderland’s little servo-sounds: electric clock, the oven where a ham was baking (turn that off at five if they’re not back, she reminded herself), a cool clunk from the freezer as the Frigidaire’s icemaker made another cube.