Christine

“I understand all that. But I don’t understand why…” Arnie paused in the doorway, oblivious of the fact that we were late for class. His hands were shoved into the back pockets of his jeans and he was frowning. “I don’t understand why he let Christine go to rack and ruin like that, Dennis. Like she was when I bought her. Mostly he talked about her like he really loved her—I know you thought it was just part of his sales-pitch but it wasn’t—and then near the end, when he was counting the money, he sort of growled, “That shitting car, I’ll be fucked if I know why you want it, boy. It’s the ace of spades.” And I said something like I thought I could fix it up really nice. And he said, “All that and more. If the shitters will let you.”

We went inside. Mr Leheureux, the French teacher, was going someplace fast, his bald head gleaming under the fluorescent lights. “You boys are late,” he said in a harried voice that reminded me of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. We hurried up until he was out of sight and then we slowed down again.

Arnie said, “When Buddy Repperton got after me like that, I was really scared.” He lowered his voice, smiling but serious “I almost pissed my pants, if you want to know the truth. Anyway, I guess I used L6Bay’s word without even thinking about it. In Repperton’s case it fits, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes.”

“I gotta go,” Arnie said. “Calculus, then Auto Shop III. I think I’ve learned the whole course on Christine the last two months anyway.”

He hurried off and I just stood there in the hall for a minute, watching him go. I had a study-hall with Miss Rat-Pack period six on Mondays, and I thought I could slip in the back unnoticed… I had done it before. Besides, seniors get away with murder, as I was rapidly learning.

I stood there, trying to shake a feeling of fright that would never be so amorphous or un-concrete again. Something was wrong, something was out of place, out of joint. There was a chill, and not all the bright October sunshine spilling through all the high school windows in the world would dispel it. Things were as they always had been, but they were getting ready to change—I felt it.

I stood there trying to get myself in gear, trying to tell myself that the chill was no more than my fears about my own future, and that it was the change coming that I was uneasy about. Maybe that was part of it. But it wasn’t all. That shitting car, I’ll be fucked if I know why you want it, boy. It’s the ace of spades. I saw Mr Leheureux coming back from the office, and I started moving.

I think that everybody has a backhoe in his or her head, and at moments of stress or trouble you can fire it up and simply push everything into a great big slit-trench in the floor of your conscious mind. Get rid of it. Bury it. Except that that slit-trench goes down into the subconscious, and sometimes, in dreams, the bodies stir and walk. I dreamed of Christine again that night, Arnie behind the wheel this time, the decomposing corpse of Roland D. LeBay lolling obscenely in the shotgun seat as the car roared out of the garage at me, pinning me with the savage circles of its headlights.

I woke up with my pillow crammed against my mouth to stifle the screams.

19 THE ACCIDENT

Tach it up, tach it up,

Buddy, gonna shut you down.

— The Beach Boys

That was the last time I talked to Arnie—really talked to him—until Thanksgiving, because the following Saturday was the day I got hurt. That was the day we played the Ridge Rock Bears again, and this time we lost by the truly spectacular score of 46-3. I wasn’t around at the end of the game, however. About seven minutes into the third quarter I got into the open, took a pass, and was setting myself to run when I was hit simultaneously by three Bears defensive linemen. There was an instant of terrible pain—a bright flare, as if I had been caught on ground zero of a nuclear blast. Then there was a lot of darkness.

Things stayed dark for a fairly long time, although it didn’t seem long to me. I was unconscious for about fifty hours, and when I woke up late on the afternoon of Monday the twenty-third of October, I was in Libertyville Community Hospital. My dad and mom were there. So was Ellie, looking pale and strained. There were dark brown circles under her eyes, and I was absurdly touched; she had found it in her heart to cry for me in spite of all the Twinkies and Yodels I had hooked out of the breadbox after she went to bed, in spite of the time, when she was twelve, that I had given her a little bag of Vigoro after she had spent about a week looking at herself sideways in the mirror with her tightest T-shirt on so she could see if her boobs were getting any bigger (she had burst into tears and my mother had been super-pissed at me for almost two weeks), in spite of all the teasing and the shitty little I’m-one-up-on-you sibling games.