Christine

Arnie came back with the beers. “What’s the thanks for?” he asked Michael. His voice was light and humorous, but his eyes flicked between us carefully. I noticed again that his complexion was really clearing, and his face seemed to have strengthened. For the first time, the two thoughts Arnie and dates didn’t seem mutually exclusive. It occurred to me that his face was almost handsome—not in any jut-jawed lifeguard king-of-the-prom way, but in an interesting, thoughtful way. He would never be Roseanne’s type, but…

“For helping with the, canoe,” Michael said casually.

“Oh.”

We drank our beers. I went home. The next day the happy threesome went off together to New York, presumably to rediscover the family unity that had been lost over the latter third of the summer.

The day before they were due back I took a ride down to Darnell’s Garage—as much to satisfy my own curiosity as Michael Cunningham’s.

The garage, standing in front of the block-long lot of junked cars, looked just as attractive in daylight as it had on the evening we had brought Christine—it had all the charm of a dead gopher.

I pulled into a vacant slot in front of the speed shop that Darnell also ran—well stocked with such items as Feully heads, Hurst gearboxes, and Ram-Jett superchargers (for all those working men who had to keep their old cars running so they could continue to put bread on the table, no doubt), not to mention a wide selection of huge mutant tyres and a variety of spinner hubcaps. Looking through the window of Darnell’s speed shop was like looking into a crazy automotive Disneyland.

I got out and walked back across the tarmac toward the garage and the clanging sound of tools, shouts, the machine-gun blast of pneumatic wrenches. A sleazy-looking guy in a cracked leather jacket was dorking around with an old BSA bike by one of the garage bays, either removing the bike’s manifold or putting it back on. There was a stutter of road-rash down his left cheek. The back of his jacket displayed a skull wearing a Green Beret and the charming motto KILL EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT EM OUT.

He looked up at me with bloodshot and lunatic Rasputin eyes, then looked back at what he was doing. He had a surgical array of tools spread out beside him, each one die-stamped with the words DARNELL’s GARAGE.

Inside, the world was full of the echoey, evocative bang of tools and the sound of men working on cars and hollering profanity at the rolling iron they were working on. Always the profanity, and always female in gender: come offa there you bitch, come loose, you cunt, come on over here, Rick, and help me get this twat off.

I looked around for Darnell and didn’t see him any place No one took any particular notice of me, so I walked over to stall twenty where Christine sat, now pointing nose-out, just like I had every right in the world to be there. In the stall to the right, two fat guys in bowling league shirts were putting a camper cap on the back of a pickup truck that had seen better days. The stall on the other side was deserted.

As I approached Christine, I felt that chill coming back. There was no reason for it, but I seemed helpless to stop it—and without even thinking, I moved a bit to the left, toward the empty stall. I didn’t want to be in front of her.

My first thought was that Arnie’s complexion had improved in tandem with Christine’s. My second thought was that he was making his improvements in a strangely haphazard way… and Arnie was usually so methodical.

The twisted, broken aerial had been replaced with a straight new one that glimmered under the fluorescent bars. Half the Fury’s front grille had been replaced; the other half was still flecked and pitted with rust. And there was something else…

I walked along her flank right to the rear bumper, frowning.

Well, it was on the other side, that’s all, I thought.

So I walked around to the other side, and it wasn’t there, either.

I stood by the back wall, still frowning, trying to remember. I was pretty sure that when we first saw her standing on LeBay’s lawn, with a FOR SALE sign propped against her windscreen, there had been a good-sized rusty dent on one side or the other, near the rear end—the sort of deep dent that my grandfather always called a “hoss-kick”. We’d be driving along the turnpike and we’d go by a car with a big dent in it somewhere and Grampy would say, “Hey, Denny, take a look there! Hoss kicked that one!” My grandfather was the sort of guy who had a downhome phrase for everything.

I started to think I must have imagined it, and then gave my head a little shake. That was sloppy thinking. It had been there; I remembered it clearly. Just because it wasn’t here now didn’t mean it hadn’t been then. Arnie had obviously knocked it out, and had done a damn good piece of bodywork covering it up.

Except…

There was no sign that he had done anything. There was no primer paint, no grey body fill, no flaked paint. Just Christine’s dull red and dirty white.