by Steven King
Another mutter.
Buddy: “I don’t give a shit!”
And for some reason this produced a stifle of laughter.
Sweaty now in spite of the knifing cold, Sandy suddenly slid his glass window shut and snapped on the TV. He drank deeply, grimacing at the heavy taste of the mixed fruit juice and cheap wine. He didn’t care for it, but Texas Driver was what they all drank when they weren’t drinking Iron City beer, and what was he supposed to do? Make out he was better than them, or something? That would get him fried, sooner or later. Buddy didn’t like wimps.
He drank, and began to feel a little better—or at least a little drunker. When one of the Airport Security cars did pass, he hardly even flinched. The cop raised a hand to Sandy. Sandy raised a hand right back, just as cool as you could want.
About fifteen minutes after it had cruised toward the back of the lot, the blue Camaro reappeared, this time in the exit lane. Buddy sat cool and relaxed behind the wheel, a three-quarters-empty bottle of Driver propped in his crotch. He was smiling, and Sandy noted uneasily how bloodshot and weird his eyes looked. That wasn’t just wine, and it wasn’t just coke, either. Buddy Repperton was no one to fuck with; Cunningham would find that out, if nothing else.
“All taken care of, my good man,” Buddy said.
“Good,” Sandy said and tried a smile. It felt a little sick. He had no feelings about Cunningham one way or another, and he was not a particularly imaginative person, but he could make a good guess about how Cunningham was going to feel when he saw what had come of all his careful work restoring that red and white Plymouth. Still, it was Buddy’s business, not his.
“Good,” he said again.
“Keep your jock on, man,” Richie said, and giggled.
“Sure,” Sandy said. He was glad they were going. Maybe he wouldn’t hang around Vandenberg’s Happy Gas so much after this. Maybe after this he didn’t want to. This was heavy shit. Too heavy, maybe. And maybe he would pick up a couple of night courses, too. He’d have to give this job up, but maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, either—it was a pretty dull fucking job.
Buddy was still looking at him, smiling that hard, gonzo smile, and Sandy took a big drink of Texas Driver. He nearly gagged. For an instant he had an image of puking down into Buddy’s upturned face, and his unease became terror.
“If the cops get in on it,” Buddy said, “you don’t know nothing, you didn’t see nothing. Like you said, you had to go in and take a crap around nine-thirty.”
“Sure, Buddy.”
“We all wore our wittle mittens. We didn’t leave any prints.”
“Sure.”
“Stay cool, Sandy,” Buddy said softly.
“Yeah, okay.”
The Camaro began to roll again. Sandy raised the gate with the manual button. The car headed toward the airport exit road at a sedate pace.
Someone called “Arf! Arf!” The sound drifted back to Sandy against the wind.
Troubled, he sat down to watch TV.
Shortly before the rush of customers who had come in on the ten-forty from Cleveland began to arrive, he poured the rest of the Driver out of the window and onto the ground. He didn’t want it anymore.
26
Christine Laid Low
The next day Arnie and Leigh rode out to the airport together after school to pick up Christine. They were planning on a trip to Pittsburgh to do some early Christmas shopping, and they were looking forward to doing it together—it seemed somehow terribly adult.
Arnie was in a fine mood on the bus, making up fanciful little vignettes about their fellow passengers and making her laugh in spite of her period, which was usually depressing and almost always painful. The fat lady in the man’s workshoes was a lapsed nun, he said. The kid in the cowboy hat was a hustler. And on and on. She got into the spirit of the thing but was not as good at it as he. It was amazing, the way he had come out of his shell … the way he had bloomed. That was really the only word for it. She felt the smug, pleased satisfaction of a prospector who has suspected the presence of gold by certain signs and has been proved correct. She loved him, and she had been right to love him.
They got off the bus at the terminal stop together and walked across the access road to the parking lot hand in hand.
“This isn’t bad,” Leigh said. It was the first time she had come out with him to pick up Christine. “Twenty-five minutes from school.”
“Yeah, it’s okay,” Arnie said. “It keeps peace in the family, that’s the important thing. I’m telling you, when my mom got home that night and saw Christine in the driveway, she went totally bullshit.”
Leigh laughed, and the wind flipped her hair out behind her. The temperature had moderated from last night’s bitter mid-teens, but it was still chilly. She was glad. Without a certain chill in the air, it didn’t feel like Christmas shopping. Bad enough the decorations in Pittsburgh wouldn’t be up yet. But it wasn’t bad; it was good. And suddenly she was glad about everything, most of all glad to be alive. And in love.
She had thought about it, the way she loved him. She had had crushes before, and once, in Massachusetts, she had thought she might be in love, but about this boy there was simply no question. He troubled her sometimes—his interest in the car seemed almost obsessive—but even her occasional unease played a part in her feelings, which were richer than anything she had ever known. And part of it, she admitted to herself, was of course selfish—she had, in weeks only, begun to make him over … to complete him.
They cut between the cars, headed for the thirty-day section of the parking lot. Overhead, a USAir jet was coming in on its final approach, the thunder of its engines rolling away in great flat waves of sound. Arnie was saying something, but the plane obliterated his voice altogether after the first few words—something about Thanksgiving dinner—and she turned to look at his face, secretly amused by his silently moving mouth.
Then, quite suddenly, his mouth stopped moving. He stopped walking. His eyes opened wider … and then seemed to bulge. His mouth began to twist, and the hand holding Leigh’s suddenly clamped down ruthlessly, grinding her fingerbones painfully together.
“Arnie—”
The jet-roar was fading, but he seemed not to have heard. His hand clamped tighter. His mouth had slammed shut now, and it was knotted into an awful grimace of surprise and terror. She thought, He’s having a heart attack … stroke … something.
“Arnie, what’s wrong?” she cried. “Arnie … oooww-whoww, that hurts!”
For one unbearable moment the pressure on the hand he had been holding so lightly and lovingly just before increased until it seemed that the bones would actually splinter and break. The high color in his cheeks was gone, and his skin was as leaden as a slate headstone.
He said one word—“Christine!”—and suddenly let go of her. He ran, thumping his leg against the bumper of a Cadillac, spinning away, almost falling, catching himself, and running forward again.
She realized at last it was something about the car—the car, the car, always it was the goddam car—and a bitter anger rose in her that was both total and despairing. For the first time she wondered if it would be possible to love him; if Arnie would allow it.
Her anger was quenched the instant she really looked … and saw.
• • •
Arnie ran to what remained of his car, hands out, and stopped so abruptly in front of it that the gesture seemed almost to be a horrified warding-off; the classic movie pose of the hit-and-run victim an instant before the lethal collision.
He stood that way for a moment, as if to stop the car, or the whole world. Then he lowered his arms. His adam’s apple lurched up and down twice as he struggled to swallow something back—a moan, a cry—and then his throat seemed to lock solid, every muscle standing out, each cord standing out, even the blood-vessels standing out in perfect relief. It was the throat of a man trying to lift a piano.
Leigh walked slowly toward him. Her hand still throbbed, and tomorrow it
would be swollen and virtually useless, but for now she had forgotten it. Her heart went out to him and seemed to find him; she felt his sorrow and shared it—or it seemed to her that she did. It was only later that she realized how much Arnie shut her out that day—how much of his suffering he elected to do alone, and how much of his hate he hid away.
“Arnie, who did it?” she asked, her voice breaking with grief for him. No, she had not liked the car, but to see it reduced to this made her understand fully what Arnie’s commitment had been, and she could hate it no longer—or so she thought.
Arnie made no answer. He stood looking at Christine, his eyes burning, his head slightly down.
The windshield had been smashed through in two places; handfuls of safety glass fragments were strewn across the slashed seat covers like trumpery diamonds. Half of the front bumper had been pried off and now dragged on the pavement, near a snarl of black wires like octopus tentacles. Three of the four side windows had also been broken. Holes had been punched through the sides of the body at waist-level in ragged, wavering lines. It looked as if some sharp, heavy instrument—maybe the pry-end of a tire iron—had been used. The passenger door hung open, and she saw that all the dashboard glass had been broken. Tufts and wads of stuffing were everywhere. The speedometer needle lay on the driver’s side floormat.
Arnie walked slowly around his car, noting all of this. Leigh spoke to him twice. He didn’t answer either time. Now the leaden color of his face was broken by two hectic, burning spots of flush riding high up on his cheekbones. He picked up the octopus-thing that had been lying on the pavement and she saw it was a distributor cap—her father had pointed that out to her once when he had been tinkering with their car.
He looked at it for a moment, as if examining an exotic zoological specimen, and then threw it down. Broken glass gritted under their heels. She spoke to him again. He didn’t answer, and now, as well as a terrible pity for him, she began to feel afraid, too. She told Dennis Guilder later that it seemed—at least at the time—perfectly possible that he might have lost his mind.
He booted a piece of chrome trim out of his way. It struck the cyclone fence at the back of the lot with a little tinkling sound. The taillights had been smashed, more trumpery gems, this time rubies, this time on the pavement instead of the seat.
“Arnie—” she tried again.
He stopped. He was looking in through the hole in the driver’s side window. A terrible low sound began to come from his chest, a jungle sound. She looked over his shoulder, saw, and suddenly felt a crazy need to laugh and scream and faint all at the same time. On the dashboard … she hadn’t noticed at first; in the midst of the general destruction she hadn’t noticed what was on the dashboard. And she wondered, with vomit suddenly rising in her throat, who could be so low, so completely low, as to do such a thing, to …
“Shitters!” Arnie cried, and his voice was not his own. It was high and shrill and cracked with fury.
Leigh turned around and threw up, holding blindly onto the car next to Christine, seeing small white dots in front of her eyes that expanded like puffed rice. Dimly she thought of the county fair—every year they’d haul an old junk car up onto a plank platform and lean a sledgehammer against it and you got three swings for a quarter. The idea was to demolish the car. But not.. . not to …
“You goddam shitters!” Arnie screamed. “I’ll get you! I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I do! If it’s the last motherfucking thing I ever do!”
Leigh threw up again and for one terrible moment found herself wishing that she had never ever met Arnie Cunningham.
27
Arnie and Regina
He let himself into the house that night at quarter of twelve. The clothes he had been wearing with the shopping trip to Pittsburgh in mind were grease-and sweat-stained. His hands were more deeply grimed, and a shallow cut corkscrewed across the back of the left like a brand. His face looked haggard and stunned. There were dark circles under his eyes.
His mother sat at the table, a game of solitaire laid out in front of her. She had been waiting for him to come home and dreading it deeply at the same time. Leigh had called and told her what had happened. The girl, who had impressed Regina as being quite a nice girl (if perhaps not quite good enough for her son), sounded as if she had been crying.
Regina, alarmed, had hung up as quickly as she could and had dialled Darnell’s Garage. Leigh had told her Arnie had called for a tow-truck from there and had ridden in with the driver. He had put her in a taxi, over her protests. The phone had rung twice and then a wheezy yet gravelly voice had said, “Yuh. Darnell’s.”
She had hung up, realizing it would be a mistake to talk to him there—and it looked as if she and Mike had already made enough mistakes about Arnie and his car. She would wait until he came home. Say what she had to say looking him in the face.
She said it now. “Arnie, I’m sorry.”
It would have been better if Mike could be here, too. But he was in Kansas City, attending a symposium on trade and the beginnings of free enterprise in the Middle Ages. He wouldn’t be back until Sunday, unless this brought him home early. She thought it might. She realized—not without some rue—that she might just be awakening to the full seriousness of this situation.
“Sorry,” Arnie echoed in a flat, accentless voice.
“Yes, I—that is, we—” She couldn’t go on. There was something terrible in the deadwood of his expression. His eyes were blanks. She could only look at him and shake her head, her eyes brimming, the hateful taste of tears in her nose and throat. She hated to cry. Strong-willed, one of two girls in a Catholic family that consisted of her blue-collar construction-worker father, her washed-out mother, and seven brothers, hellbent on college in spite of her father’s belief that the only things girls learned there was how to stop being virgins and how to throw over the church, she had shed her fair share of tears and more. And if her own family thought she was hard sometimes, it was because they didn’t understand that when you went through hell you came out baked by the fire. And when you had to burn to have your own way, you always wanted to have it.
“You know something?” Arnie asked.
She shook her head, still feeling the hot, slithery burn of the tears under her lids.
“You’d make me laugh, if I wasn’t so tired I could hardly stand up. You could have been out there swinging the tire irons and the hammers along with the guys that did it. You’re probably happier about it than they are.”
“Arnie, that’s not fair!”
“It is fair!” he roared at her, his eyes suddenly blazing with a horrible fire. For the first time in her life she was afraid of her son. “Your idea to get it out of the driveway! His idea to put it in the airport lot! Who do you think is to blame here? Just who do you think? Do you think it would have happened if it had been here? Huh?”
He took a step toward her, fists clenched at his sides, and she had all she could do to keep from flinching backward.
“Arnie, can’t we even talk about this?” she asked. “Like two rational human beings?”
“One of them took a shit on the dashboard of my car,” he said coldly. “How’s that for rational, Mom?”
She had honestly believed she had the tears under control, but this news—news of such a stupid, irrational fury—brought them back. She cried. She cried in grief for what her son had seen. She lowered her head and cried in bewilderment and pain and fear.
All her life as a mother she had felt secretly superior to the women around her who had children older than Arnie. When he was one, those other mothers had shaken their heads dolefully and told her to wait until he was five—that was when the trouble started, that was when they were old enough to say “shit” in front of their grandmothers and play with matches when left alone. But Arnold, as good as gold at one, had still been as good as gold at five. Then the other mothers had rolled their eyes and said wait until he’s ten; and then it had been fifteen, that was when it really got st
icky, what with the dope and the rock concerts and girls that would do anything and—God forbid—stealing hubcaps and those … well, diseases.
And through it all she had continued to smile inside because it was all working out according to plan, it was all working out the way she felt her own childhood should have. Her son had warm, supportive parents who cared about him, who would give him anything (within reason), who would gladly send him to the college of his choice (as long as it was a good one), thereby finishing the game/business/vocation of Parenting with a flourish. If you had suggested that Arnie had few friends and was often bullyragged by the others, she would have starchily pointed out that she had gone to a parochial school in a tough neighborhood where girls’ cotton panties were sometimes torn off for a joke and then set on fire with Zippo lighters engraved with the crucified body of Jesus. And if you had suggested that her own attitudes toward child-rearing differed only in terms of material goals from the attitudes of her hated father, she would have been furious and pointed out her good son as her final vindication.
But now her good son stood before her, pale, exhausted, and greased to the elbows, seeming to thrum with the same sort of barely chained anger that had been his grandfather’s trademark, even looking like him. Everything seemed to have fallen into a shambles.
“Arnie, we’ll talk about what’s to be done in the morning,” she said, trying to pull herself together and beat back the tears. “Well talk about it in the morning.”
“Not unless you get up real early,” he said, seeming to lose interest. “I’m going upstairs and catch about four hours, and then I’m going down to the garage again.”
“What for?”
He uttered a crazy laugh and flapped his arms under the kitchen’s fluorescent bars as if he would fly. “What do you think for? I got a lot of work to do! More work than you’d believe!”
“No—you have school tomorrow … I … I forbid it, Arnie, I absolutely—”
He turned to look at her, study her, and she flinched again. This was like some grinding nightmare that was just going to go on and on.
