Christine

by Стивен Кинг

  “You need her that bad?” I asked. “Man, you’re hooked right through the fucking bag, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said hoarsely. “You stole my girl. Nothing is going to change that. You went behind my back… you cheated… you’re just a shitter, like all the rest of them.” He was looking at me now, his eyes wide and hurt and blazing with anger. “I thought I could trust you, and you turned out to be worse than Repperton or any of them!” He took a step toward me and cried out in a perfect fury of loss, “You stole her, you shitter!”

  I lurched forward another step on my crutches; one of them slid a little bit in the packed snow underfoot. We were like two reluctant gunslingers approaching each other.

  “You can’t steal what’s been given away,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the night she choked in your car. The night Christine tried to kill her. You told her you didn’t need her. You told her to fuck off.”

  “I never did! That’s a lie! That’s a goddam lie!”

  “Who am I talking to?” I asked.

  “Never mind!” His grey eyes were huge behind his spectacles. “Never mind who the fuck you’re talking to! That’s nothing but a dirty lie! No more than I’d expect from that stinking bitch!”

  Another step closer. His pale face was marked with flaring red patches of colour.

  “When you write your name, it doesn’t look like your signature anymore, Arnie.”

  “You shut up, Dennis.”

  “Your father says it’s like having a stranger in the house.”

  “I’m warning you, man.”

  “Why bother?” I asked brutally. “I know what’s going to happen. So does Leigh. The same thing that happened to Buddy Repperton and Will Darnell and all the others. Because you’re not Arnie at all anymore. Are you in there, LeBay? Come on out and let me see you. I’ve seen you before. I saw you on New Year’s Eve, I saw you yesterday at the chicken place. I know you’re in there; why don’t you stop fucking around and come out?”

  And he did… but in Arnie’s face this time, and that was more terrible than all the skulls and skeletons and comic-book horrors ever thought of. Arnie’s face changed. A sneer bloomed on his lips like a rancid rose. And I saw him as he must have been back when the world was young and a car was all a young man needed to have; everything else would just automatically follow. I saw George LeBay’s big brother.

  I only remember one thing about him, but I remember that one thing very well. His anger. He was always angry.

  He came toward me, closing the distance between where he had been and where I stood propped on my crutches. His eyes were filmy and beyond all reach. That sneer was stamped on his face like the mark of a branding-iron.

  I had time to think of the scar on George LeBay’s forearm, skidding from his elbow to his wrist. He pushed me and then he came back and threw me. I could hear that fourteen-year-old LeBay shouting, You stay out of my way from now on, you goddam snotnose, stay out of my way, you hear?

  It was LeBay I was facing now, and he was not a man who took losing easily. Check that: he didn’t take losing at all.

  “Fight him, Arnie,” I said. “He’s had his own way too long. Fight him, kill him, make him stay d—”

  He swung his foot and kicked my right crutch out from under me. I struggled to stay up, tottered, almost made it… and then he kicked the left crutch away. I fell down on the cold packed snow. He took another step and stood above me, his face hard and alien.

  “You got it coming, and you’re going to get it,” he said remotely.

  “Yeah, right,” I gasped. “You remember the ant farms, Arnie? Are you in there someplace? This dirty sucker never had a fucking ant farm in his life. He never had a friend in his life.”

  And suddenly the calm hardness broke. His face—his face roiled. I don’t know how else to describe it. LeBay was there, furious at having to put down a kind of internal mutiny. Then Arnie was there—drawn, tired, ashamed, but, most of all, desperately unhappy. Then LeBay again, and his foot drew back to kick me as I lay on the snow groping for my crutches and feeling helpless and useless and dumb. Then it was Arnie again, my friend Arnie, brushing his hair back off his forehead in that familiar, distracted gesture; it was Arnie saying, “Oh, Dennis… Dennis… I’m sorry… I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s too late for sorry, man,” I said.

  I got one crutch and then the other. I pulled myself up little by little, slipping twice before I could get the crutches under me again. Now my hands felt like pieces of furniture. Arnie made no move to help me; he stood with his back against the van, his eyes wide and shocked.

  “Dennis, I can’t help it,” he whispered. “Sometimes I feel like I’m not even here anymore. Help me, Dennis. Help me.”

  “Is LeBay there?” I asked him.

  “He’s always here,” Arnie groaned. “Oh God, always! Except—”

  “The car?”

  “When Christine… when she goes, then he’s with her. That’s the only time he’s… he’s…”

  Arnie fell silent. His head slipped over to one side. His chin rolled on his chest in a boneless pivot. His hair dangled toward the snow. Spit ran out of his mouth and splattered on his boots. And then he began to scream thinly and beat his gloved fists on the van behind him:

  “Go away! Go away! Go awaaaaay!”

  Then nothing for maybe five seconds nothing except the shuddering of his body, as if a basket of snakes had been dumped inside his clothes; nothing except that slow, horrible roll of his chin on his chest.

  I thought maybe he was winning, that he was beating the dirty old sonofabitch. But when he looked up, Arnie was gone. LeBay was there.

  “It’s all going to happen just like he said,” LeBay told me. “Let it go, boy. Maybe I won’t drive over you.”

  Come on over to Darnell’s tonight, I said. My voice was harsh, my throat as dry as sand. “We’ll play. I’ll bring Leigh. You bring Christine.”

  “I’ll pick my own time and place,” LeBay said, and grinned with Arnie’s mouth, showing Arnie’s teeth, which were young and strong—a mouth still years from the indignity of dentures. “You won’t know when or where. But you’ll know… when the time comes.”

  “Think again,” I said, almost casually. “Come to Darnell’s tonight, or she and I start talking tomorrow.”

  He laughed, an ugly contemptuous sound. “And where will that get you? The asylum over at Reed City?”

  “Oh, we won’t be taken seriously at first,” I said. “I give you that. But that stuff about how they put you in the loonybin as soon as you start talking about ghosts and demons… uh-uh, LeBay. Maybe in your day, before flying saucers and The Exorcist and that house in Amityville. These days a hell of a lot of people believe in that stuff.”

  He was still grinning, but his eyes looked at me with narrow suspicion. That, and something else. I thought that something else was the first sparkle of fear.

  “And what you don’t seem to realize is how many people know something is wrong.”

  His grin faltered. Of course he must have realized that, and been worried about it. But maybe killing gets to be a fever; maybe after a while you are simply unable to stop and count the cost.

  “Whatever weird, filthy kind of life you still have is all wrapped up in that car,” I said. “You knew it, and you planned to use Arnie from the very beginning—except that “planned” is the wrong word, because you never really planned anything, did you? You just followed your intuitions.”

  He made a snarling sound and turned to go.

  “You really want to think about it,” I called after him. “Arnie’s father knows something is rotten. So does mine. I think there must be some police somewhere who’d be willing to listen to anything about how their friend Junkins died. And it all comes back to Christine, Christine, Christine. Sooner or later someone’s going to run her through the crusher in the back of Darnell�
�s just on general principles.”

  He had turned back and was looking at me with a bright mixture of hate and fear in his eyes.

  “We’ll keep talking, and a lot of people will laugh at us, I don’t doubt it. But I’ve got two pieces of cast with Arnie’s signature on them. Only one of them isn’t his. It’s yours. I’ll take them to the state cops and keep pestering them until they have a handwriting specialist confirm that. People are going to start watching Arnie. People are going to start watching Christine too. You get the picture?”

  “Sonny, you don’t worry me one fucking bit.” But his eyes said something different. I was getting to him, all right.

  “It’s going to happen,” I said. “People are only rational on the surface. They still toss salt over their left shoulder if they spill the shaker, they don’t walk under ladders, they believe in survival after death. And sooner or later — probably sooner, with Leigh and me shooting off our mouths—someone is going to turn that car of yours into a sardine can. And I’m willing to bet that when it goes, you’ll go with it.”

  “Don’t you just wish!” he sneered.

  “We’ll be at Darnell’s tonight,” I said. “If you’re good, you can get rid of both of us. That won’t end it either, but it might give you some breathing space… time enough to get out of town. But I don’t think you’re good enough, chum. It’s gone on too long. We’re getting rid of you.”

  I crutched back to my Duster and got in. I used the crutches more clumsily than I had to, tried to make myself look more incapacitated than I really was. I had rocked him by mentioning the signatures; it was time to leave before I overplayed my hand. But there was one more thing. One thing guaranteed to drive LeBay into a frenzy.

  I pulled my left leg in with my hands, slammed the door, and leaned out.

  I looked into his eyes and smiled.

  “She’s great in bed,” I said. “Too bad you’ll never know.”

  With a furious roar, he charged at me. I rolled up the window and slapped down the door-lock. Then, leisurely, I started the engine while he slammed his gloved fists on the glass. His face was snarling, terrible. There was no Arnie in it now. No Arnie at all. My friend was gone. I felt a dark sorrow that was deeper than tears or fear, but I kept that slow, insulting, dirty grin on my face. Then, slowly, I raised my middle finger to the glass.

  “Fuck you, LeBay,” I said, and then pulled out, leaving him to stand there in the lot, shaking with that simple, unswerving fury his brother had told me of. It was that more than anything else that I was counting on to bring him tonight.

  We’d see.

  50

  PETUNIA

  Something warm was running in my eyes

  But I found my baby somehow that night,

  I held her tight, I kissed her our last kiss…

  — J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers

  I drove about four blocks before the reaction set in, and then I had to pull over. I had the shakes, bad. Not even the heater, turned up to full, could kill them. My breath came in harsh little gasps. I clutched myself to keep warm, but it seemed that I would never be warm again, never. That face, that horrible face, and Arnie buried somewhere inside, he’s always here, Arnie had said, always except when—what? When Christine rolled by herself, of course. LeBay couldn’t be both places at the same time. That was beyond even his powers.

  At last I was able to drive on again, and I wasn’t even aware that I had been crying until I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the wet circles under my eyes.

  It was quarter to ten by the time I made it out to Johnny Pomberton’s place. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing green gum-rubber boots and a heavy red-and-black-checked hunting jacket. An old hat with a grease-darkened bill was tilted up on his balding head as he studied the grey sky.

  “More snow comin, the radio says. Didn’t know as you’d really be out, boy, but I brung her around forya just in case. What do you think of her?”

  I got my crutches under me again and got out of my car.

  Road salt gritted under the crutches’ rubber tips, but the going felt safe. Standing in front of Johnny Pomberton’s woodpile was one of the strangest-looking vehicles I’ve ever seen in my life. A faint, pungent odour, not exactly pleasant, drifted over from it to where we stood.

  At one time, far back in its career, it had been a GM product—or so the logo on its gigantic snout advertised. Now it was a little bit of everything. One thing it surely was, and that was big. The top of its grille would have been head-high on a tall man. Behind and over it, the cab loomed like a big square helmet. Behind that, supported by two sets of double wheels on each side, was a long, tubular body, like the body of a gasoline tanker truck.

  Except that I never saw a tanker truck before this one that was painted bright pink. The word PETUNIA was written across the side in Roman gothic letters two feet high.

  “I don’t know what to think of her,” I said. “What is she?”

  Pomberton poked a Camel cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a quick flick of his horny thumbnail on the tip of a wooden match. “Kaka sucker,” he said.

  “What?”

  He grinned. “Twenty-thousand-gallon capacity,” he said. “She’s a corker, is Petunia.”

  “I don’t get you.” But I was starting to. There was an absurd, grisly irony to it that Arnie—the old Arnie would have appreciated.

  I had asked Pomberton over the phone if he had a big, heavy truck to rent, and this was the biggest one currently in his yard. All four of his dump trucks were working, two in Libertyville and two others in Philly Hill. He’d had a grader, he explained to me, but it had had a nervous bustdown just after Christmas. He said he was having a devilish job keeping his trucks rolling since Darnell’s Garage shut down.

  Petunia was essentially a tanker, no more and no less. Her job was pumping out septic systems.

  “How much does she weigh?” I asked Pomberton.

  He flicked away his cigarette. “Dry, or loaded with shit?”

  I gulped. “Which is it now?”

  He threw his head back and laughed. “Do you think I’d rentcher a loaded truck?” He pronounced it ludded truck. “Naw, naw—she’s dry, dry as a bone and all hosed out. Sure she is. Still a little fragrant, though, ain’t she?”

  I sniffed. She was fragrant, all right.

  “It could be a lot worse,” I said. “I guess.”

  “Sure,” Pomberton said. “You bet, Old Petunia’s original pedigree was lost long ago, but what’s on her current registration is eighteen thousand pounds, GVW.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Gross vehicle weight,” he said. “If they pull you over on the Interstate and you weigh more than eighteen thousand the ICC gets upset. Dry, she prob’ly goes around, I dunno, eight-nine thousand Pounds. She’s got a five-speed tranny with a two-speed differential, giving you ten forward speeds all told… if you can run a clutch.”

  He cast a dubious eye up and down my crutches and lit another cigarette.

  “Can you run a clutch?”

  “Sure,” I said with a straight face. “If it isn’t really stiff.” But for how long? That was the question.

  “Well, that’s your business and I won’t mess into it.” He looked at me brightly. “I’ll give you a ten per cent discount for cash, on account of I don’t usually report cash transactions to my favourite uncle.”

  I checked my wallet and found three twenties and three tens. “How much did you say for one day?”

  “How does ninety bucks sound?”

  I gave it to him. I had been prepared to pay a hundred and twenty.

  “What are you going to do with your Duster there?”

  It hadn’t even crossed my mind until just now. “Could I leave it here? Just for today?”

  “Sure,” Pomberton said, “you can leave it here all week, I don’t give a shit. Just put it around the back and leave the keys in it in case I have to move it.”

  I drove around back where the
re was a wilderness of cannibalized truck parts poking out of the deep snow like bones from white sand. It took me nearly ten minutes to work my way back around on my crutches. I could have done it faster if I’d used my left leg a bit, but I wouldn’t do that. I was saving it for Petunia’s clutch.

  I approached Petunia, feeling dread gather in my stomach like a small black cloud. I had no doubt it would stop Christine… if she really showed up at Darnell’s Garage tonight and if I could drive the damned truck. I had never driven anything that big in my life, although the summer before I’d gotten some hours in on a bulldozer and Brad Jeffries had let me try the payloader a couple of times after knocking off for the day.

  Pomberton stood there in his checked jacket, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his workpants, watching me with wise eyes. I got over to the driver’s side, grabbed the doorhandle, and slipped a little. He took a step or two toward me.

  “I can make it.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  I jammed the crutch into my armpit again, my breath frosting out in quick little gasps, and pulled the door open. Holding onto the door’s inside handle with my left hand and balancing on my right leg like a stork, I threw my crutches into the cab and then followed them. The keys were in the ignition, the shift pattern printed on the stick. I slammed the door, pushed the clutch down with my left leg—not much pain, so far so good—and started Petunia up. Her engine sounded like a full field of stockers at Philly Plains.

  Pomberton strolled over. “Little noisy, ain’t she?” he yelled.

  “Sure!” I screamed back.

  “You know,” he bellowed, “I doubt like hell if you got an I on your licence, boy.” An I on your licence meant that the state had tested you on the big trucks. I had an A for motorcycles (much to my mother’s horror) but no I.

  I grinned down at him. “You never checked because I looked trustworthy.”

  He smiled back. “Sure.”