Christine

There was one final echoing bang—it rolled down the street like the explosion of a mortar shell—and then the Plymouth turned left on Martin Street, which brought you to Walnut about a mile up. The westering sun turned its battered red body briefly to gold as it moved out of sight. I saw that Arnie had his elbow cocked out the window.

I turned to LeBay, mad all over again, ready to give him some more hell. I tell you I felt sick inside my heart. But what I saw stopped me cold.

Roland D. LeBay was crying. It was horrible and it was grotesque and most of all it was pitiable. When I was nine, we had a cat named Captain Beefheart, and he got hit by a UPS truck. We took him to the vet’s—my mom had to drive slow because she was crying and it was hard for her to see—and I sat in the back with Captain Beef heart. He was in a box, and I kept telling him the vet would save him, it was going to be okay, but even a little nine-year-old dumbhead like me could see it was never going to be all right for Captain Beefheart again, because some of his guts were out and there was blood coming out of his asshole and there was shit in the box and on his fur and he was dying. I tried to pet him and he bit my hand, right in the sensitive webbing between the thumb and the first finger. The pain was bad; that terrible feeling of pity was worse. I had not felt anything like that since then. Not that I was complaining, you understand; I don’t think people should have feelings like that often. You have a lot of feelings like that, and I guess they take you away to the funny-farm to make baskets.

LeBay was standing on his balding lawn not far from the place where that big patch of oil had defoliated everything, and he had this great big old man’s snotrag out and his head was down and he was wiping his eyes with it. The tears gleamed greasily on his checks, more like sweat than real tears. His adam’s apple went up and down.

I turned my head so I wouldn’t have to look at him cry and happened to stare straight into his one-car garage. Before, it had seemed really full—the stuff along the walls, of course, but most of all that huge old car with its double headlights and its wraparound windscreen and its acre of hood. Now the stuff along the walls only served to accentuate the garage’s essential emptiness. It gaped like a toothless mouth.

That was almost as bad as LeBay. But when I looked back, the old bastard had gotten himself under control well, mostly. He had stopped leaking at the eyes and he had stuffed the snotrag into the back pocket of his patented old man’s pants. But his face was still bleak. Very bleak.

“Well, that’s that,” he said hoarsely. “I’m shot of her, sonny.”

“MrLeBay,” I said. “I only wish my friend could make the same statement. If you knew the trouble he was in over that rustbucket with his folks—”

“Get out of here,” he said, “You sound like a goddam sheep. Just baa, baa, baa, that’s all I hear comin out'n your hole. I think your friend there knows more than you do. Go and see if he needs a hand.”

I started down the lawn to my car. I didn’t want to hang around LeBay a moment longer.

“Nothin but baa, baa, baa!” he yelled shrewishly after me, making me think of that old song by the Youngbloods—I am a one-note man, I play it all I can “You don’t know half as much as you think you do!”

I got into my car and drove away. I glanced back once as I made the turn onto Martin Street and saw him standing there on his lawn, the sunlight gleaming on his bald head.

As things turned out, he was right.

I didn’t know half as much as I thought I did.

5 HOW WE GOT TO DARNELL’s

I got a ’34 wagon and we call it a woody,

You know she’s not very cherry,

She’s an oldy but a goody…

— Jan and Dean

I drove down Martin to Walnut and turned right, toward Basin Drive. It didn’t take long to catch up with Arnie. He was pulled into the kerb, and Christine’s boot-lid was up. An automobile jack so old that it almost looked as if it might once have been used for changing wheels on Conestoga wagons was leaning against the crooked back bumper. The right rear tyre was flat.

I pulled in behind him and had no more than gotten out when a young woman waddled down towards us from her house, skirting a pretty good collection of plastic-fantastic that was planted on her lawn (two pink flamingos, four or five little stone ducks in a line behind a big stone mother duck, and a really good plastic wishing well with plastic flowers planted in the plastic bucket). She was in dire need of Weight Watchers.

“You can’t leave that junk here,” she said around a mouthful of chewing gum. “You can’t leave that junk parked in front of our house, I just hope you know that.”

“Ma’am,” Arnie said. “I had a flat tyre, is all. I’ll get it out of here just as soon as—”