Christine

We surprised the hell out of ourselves and won the game—as it turned out, that was one of only two we won that whole season… not that I was with the team when the season ended.

We had no right to win; we went out on the field feeling like losers, and we lost the toss. The Hillmen (dumb name for a team, but what’s so bright about being known as the Terriers when you get right down to it?) went forty yards on their first two plays, going through our defensive line like cheese through a goose. Then, on the third play—their third first-and-ten in a row—their quarterback coughed up the ball. Gary Tardiff grabbed it up and rambled sixty yards for the score, a great big grin on his face.

The Hillmen and their coach went bananas protesting that the ball had been dead at the line of scrimmage, but the officials disagreed and we led 6–0. From my place on the bench I was able to look across at the visitors” bleachers and could see that the few Libertyville fans there were going crazy. I guess they had a right to; it was the first time we’d led in a game all season. Arnie and Leigh were waving Terriers pennants. I waved at them. Leigh saw me, waved back, then elbowed Arnie. He waved back too. They looked as if they were getting pretty chummy up there, which made me grin.

As for the game, we never looked back after that first flukey score. We had that mystic thing, momentum, on our side—maybe for the only time that year. I didn’t break the Conference touchdown record as Arnie had predicted, but I scored three times, one of them on a ninety-yard runback, the longest I ever made. At halftime it was 17-0, and Coach was a new man. He saw a complete turnaround ahead of us, the greatest comeback in the history of the Conference. Of course that turned out to be a fool’s dream, but he surely was excited that day, and I felt good for him, as I had for Arnie and Leigh, getting to know each other so profitably and easily.

The second half was not so good; our defence resumed the mostly prone posture it had assumed in our first three games, but it was still never really close. We won 27–18.

Coach had taken me out halfway through the fourth quarter to put in Brian McNally, who would be replacing me next year—actually even earlier than that, as it turned out. I showered and changed up, then came back out just as the two-minute warning went off.

The parking lot was full of cars but empty of people. Wild cheering came from the field as the Hillmen fans urged their team to do the impossible in the last two minutes of play. From this distance it all seemed as unimportant as it undoubtedly was”

I walked over toward Christine.

There she sat with her rust-flecked sides and her new bonnet and her tailfins that seemed a thousand miles along. A dinosaur from the dark ditty-bop days of the ’50s when all the oil millionaires were from Texas and the Yankee dollar was kicking the shit out of the Japanese yen instead of the other way around. Back in the days when Carl Perkins was singing about pink pedal pushers and Johnny Horton was singing about dancing all night on a honky-tonk hardwood floor and the biggest teen idol in the country was Edd “Kookie” Byrnes.

I touched Christine. I tried to caress it as Arnie had done, to like it for Arnie’s sake as Leigh had done. Surely if anyone should be able to make himself like it, it should be me. Leigh had only known Arnie a month. I had known him my whole life.

I slipped my hand along the rusty surface and I thought of George LeBay, and Veronica and Rita LeBay, and somewhere along the line the hand that was supposed to be caressing closed into a fist and I suddenly slammed it down on Christine’s flank as hard as I could—plenty hard enough to hurt my hand and make myself utter a defensive little laugh and wonder what the hell I thought I was doing.

The sound of rust sitting down onto the hottop in small flakes.

The sound of a bass drum from the football field, like a giant’s heartbeat.

The sound of my own heartbeat.

I tried the front door.

It was locked.

I licked my lips and realized I was scared.

It was almost as if—this was very funny, this was hilarious—it was almost as if this car didn’t like me, as if it suspected me of wanting to come between it and Arnie, and that the reason I didn’t want to walk in front of it was because—

I laughed again and then remembered my dream and stopped laughing. This was too much like it for comfort. It wasn’t Chubby McCarthy blaring over the PA, of course, not in Hidden Hills, but the rest of it brought on a dreamy, unpleasant sense of déjà vu—the sound of the cheers, the sound of padded body contact, the wind hissing through trees that looked like cutouts under an overcast sky.

The engine would gun. The car would lurch forward, drop back, lurch forward, drop back. And then the tyres would scream as it roared right at me—