Christine

Arnie wasn’t there when I woke up, but he joined my family shortly; he and Leigh had been down in the waiting room. That evening my aunt and uncle from Albany showed up, and the rest of that week was a steady parade of family and friends—the entire football team showed up, including Coach Puffer, who looked as if he had aged about twenty years. I guess he had found out there were worse things than a losing season. Coach was the one who broke the news to me that I was never going to play football again, and I don’t know what he expected—for me to bust out crying or maybe have hysterics, from the drawn, tense look on his face. But I didn’t have much of a reaction at all, inwardly or outwardly. I was just glad to be alive and to know I would walk again, eventually.

If I had been hit just once, I probably could have bounced right up and gone back for more. But the human body was never meant to get creamed from three different angles at the same time. Both of my legs were broken, the left in two places. My right arm had whipped around behind me when I went down, and I had sustained a nasty greenstick fracture of the forearm. But all of that was really only the icing on the cake. I had also gotten a fractured skull and sustained what the doctor in charge of my case kept calling “a lower spinal accident”, which seemed to mean that I had come within about a centimetre of being paralysed from the waist down for the rest of my life.

I got a lot of visitors, a lot of flowers, a lot of cards. All of it was, in some ways, very enjoyable—like being alive to help celebrate your own wake.

But I also got a lot of pain and a lot of nights when I couldn’t sleep; I got an arm suspended over my body by weights and pulleys, likewise a leg (they both seemed to itch all the time under the casts), and a temporary cast what is called a “presser cast'—around my lower back. Also, of course, I got the prospect of a long hospital stay and endless trips in a wheelchair to that chamber of horrors so innocently labelled the Therapy Wing.

Oh and one other thing—I got a lot of time.

I read the paper; I asked questions of my visitors; and on more than a few occasions, as things went on and my suspicions began to get out of hand, I asked myself if I might not be losing my mind.

I was in the hospital until Christmas, and by the time I got home, my suspicions had almost taken their final shape. I was finding it more and more difficult to deny that monstrous shape, and I knew damned well I wasn’t losing my mind. In some ways it would have been better—more comforting—if I could have believed that. By then I was badly frightened, and more than half in love with my best friend’s girl, as well.

Time to think… too much time.

Time to call myself a hundred names for what I was thinking about Leigh. Time to took up at the ceiling of my room and wish I had never heard of Arnie Cunningham… or Leigh Cabot… or of Christine.

Part II ARNIE—TEENAGE LOVE-SONGS

20 THE SECOND ARGUMENT

The Dealer came up to me and said, “Trade in your Fo’d, And I’ll put you in a car that’ll Eat up the road! Just tell me what you want and Sign that line, I’ll have it brought down to you In an hour’s time.” I’m gonna get me a car And I’ll be headed on down the road; Then I won’t have to worry about That broken-down, ragged Ford.

— Chuck Berry

Arnie Cunningham’s 1958 Plymouth became street-legal on the afternoon of November 1, 1978. He finished the process, which had really begun the night he and Dennis Guilder had changed that first flat tyre, by paying an excise tax fee of $8.50, a municipal road tax of $2.00 (which also enabled him to park free at the meters in the downtown area), and a licence-plate fee of $15.00. He was issued Pennsylvania plate HY-6241-J at the Motor Vehicle Bureau in Monroeville.

He drove back from the MVB in a car Will Darnell had loaned him and rolled out of Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage behind the wheel of Christine. He drove her home.

His father and mother arrived together from Horlicks University an hour or so later. The fight started almost at once.

“Did you see it?'Arnie asked, speaking to them both but perhaps a little more to his father. “I registered it just afternoon.”

He was proud; he had reason to be. Christine had just been washed and waxed, and she gleamed in the late afternoon autumn sunlight. There was still a lot of rust on her, but she looked a thousand times better than she had on the day Arnie bought her. The rocker panels, like the bonnet and the back seat, were brand new. The interior was spick and span and neat as a pin. The glass and the chrome gleamed.