by Steven King
I looked around for Darnell and didn’t see him any place. No one took any particular notice of me, so I walked over to stall twenty where Christine sat, now pointing nose-out, just like I had every right in the world to be there. In the stall to the right, two fat guys in bowling league shirts were putting a camper cap on the back of a pickup truck that had seen better days. The stall on the other side was deserted.
As I approached Christine, I felt that chill coming back. There was no reason for it, but I seemed helpless to stop it—and without even thinking, I moved a bit to the left, toward the empty stall. I didn’t want to be in front of her.
My first thought was that Arnie’s complexion had improved in tandem with Christine’s. My second thought was that he was making his improvements in a strangely haphazard way … and Arnie was usually so methodical.
The twisted, broken antenna had been replaced with a straight new one that glimmered under the fluorescent bars. Half the Fury’s front grille had been replaced; the other half was still flecked and pitted with rust. And there was something else .. .
I walked along her right flank to the rear bumper, frowning.
Well, it was on the other side, that’s all, I thought.
So I walked around to the other side, and it wasn’t there, either.
I stood by the back wall, still frowning, trying to remember. I was pretty sure that when we first saw her standing on LeBay’s lawn, with a FOR SALE sign propped against her windshield, there had been a good-sized rusty dent on one side or the other, near the rear end—the sort of deep dent that my grandfather always called a “hoss-kick.” We’d be driving along the turnpike and we’d go by a car with a big dent in it somewhere and Grampy would say, “Hey, Denny, take a look there! Hoss kicked that one!” My grandfather was the sort of guy who had a downhome phrase for everything.
I started to think I must have imagined it, and then gave my head a little shake. That was sloppy thinking. It had been there; I remembered it clearly. Just because it wasn’t here now didn’t mean it hadn’t been then. Arnie had obviously knocked it out, and had done a damn good piece of bodywork covering it up.
Except…
There was no sign that he had done anything. There was no primer paint, no gray body fill, no flaked paint. Just Christine’s dull red and dirty white.
But it had been there, goddammit! A deep dimple filled with a snarl of rust, on one side or the other.
But it sure was gone now.
I stood there in the clatter and thud of tools and machinery and felt very alone and suddenly very scared. It was all wrong, it was all crazy. He had replaced the radio antenna when the tailpipe was practically dragging on the ground. He had replaced one half of the grille but not the other. He had talked to me about doing a front-end job, but inside he had replaced the ripped and dusty back seat cover with a bright red new one. The front seat cover was still a dusty wreck with a spring peeking through on the passenger side.
I didn’t like it at all. It was crazy and it wasn’t like Arnie.
Something came to me, a trace of memory, and without even thinking about it, I stood back and looked at the entire car—not just one thing here and one thing there, but everything. And I had it; it clicked into place, and the chill came back.
That night when we had brought it here. The flat tire. The replacement. I had looked at that new tire on that old car and thought it was as if a little bit of the old car had been scratched away and that the new car—fresh, resplendent, just off the assembly line in a year when Ike had been President and Batista had still been in charge of Cuba—was peeking through.
What I was seeing now was like that … only instead of just a single new tire, there were all sorts of things—the aerial, a wink of new chrome from the grille, one taillight that was a bright deep red, that new seat cover in the back.
In its turn, that brought back something else from childhood. Arnie and I had gone to Vacation Bible School together for two weeks each summer, and every day the teacher would tell a Bible story and leave it unfinished. Then she would give each kid a blank sheet of “magic paper.” And if you scraped the edge of a coin or the side of your pencil over it, a picture would gradually emerge out of the white—the dove bringing the olive branch back to Noah, the walls of Jericho tumbling down, good miracle stuff like that. It used to fascinate both of us, seeing the pictures gradually emerge. At first just lines floating in the void … and then the lines would connect with other lines … they would take on coherence … take on meaning …
I looked at Arnie’s Christine with growing horror, trying to shake the feeling that in her I was seeing something terribly similar to those magic miracle pictures.
I wanted to look under the hood.
Suddenly it seemed very important that I look under the hood.
I went around to the front (I didn’t like to stand in front of it—no good reason why not, I just didn’t) and fumbled around for the hood release. I couldn’t get it. Then I realized that it was probably inside.
I started to go around, and then I saw something else, something that scared me shitless. I could have been wrong about the hoss-kick, I suppose. I knew I wasn’t, but at least technically …
But this was something else entirely.
The web of cracks in the windshield was smaller.
I was positive it was smaller.
My mind raced back to that day a month ago when I had wandered into LeBay’s garage to look at the car while Arnie went into the house with the old man to do the deal. The entire left side of the windshield had been a spider’s web of cracks radiating out from one central, zigzagging fault that had probably been caused by a flying stone.
Now the spider’s web seemed smaller, simpler—you could see into the car from that side, and you hadn’t been able to before, I was sure of that (just a trick of the light, that’s all, my mind whispered).
Yet I had to be wrong—because it was impossible. Simply impossible. You could replace a windshield; that was no problem if you had the money. But to make a webbing of cracks shrink—
I laughed a little. It was a shaky sound, and one of the guys working on the camper cap looked up at me curiously and said something to his buddy. It was a shaky sound, but maybe better than no sound at all. Of course it was the light, and nothing more. I had seen the car for the first time with the westering sun shining fully on the flawed windshield, and I had seen it the second time in the shadows of LeBay’s garage. Now I was seeing it under these high-set fluorescent tubes. Three different kinds of light, and all it added up to was an optical illusion.
Still, I wanted to look under the hood. More than ever.
I went around to the driver’s side door and gave it a yank. The door didn’t open. It was locked. Of course it was; all four of the door-lock buttons were down. Arnie wouldn’t be apt to leave it unlocked in here, so anybody could get inside and poke around. Maybe Repperton was gone, but genus Creepus was weed-common. I laughed again—silly old Dennis—but this time it sounded even more shrill and shaky. I was starting to feel spaced-out, the way I sometimes felt the morning after I smoked a little too much pot.
Locking the Fury’s doors was a very natural thing to do, all right. Except that, when I walked around the car the first time, I thought I had noticed the door-lock buttons had all been up.
I stepped slowly backward again, looking at the car. It sat there, still little more than rusting hulk. I was not thinking any one thing specific—I am quite sure of that—except maybe it was as if it knew that I wanted to get inside and pull the hood release.
And because it didn’t want me to do that, it had locked its own doors?
That was really a very humorous idea. So humorous that I had another laugh (several people were glancing at me now, the way that folks always glance at people who laugh for no apparent reason when they are by themselves).
A big hand fell on my shoulder and turned me around. It was Darnell, with a dead stub of cigar stuck in the side of his mouth.
The end of it was wet and pretty gross-looking. He was wearing small half-specs, and the eyes behind them were coldly speculative.
“What are you doing, kiddo?” he asked. “This ain’t your property.”
The guys with the camper cap were watching us avidly. One of them nudged the other and whispered something.
“It belongs to a friend of mine,” I said. “I brought it in with him. Maybe you remember me. I was the one with the large skin-tumor on the end of my nose and the—”
“I don’t give a shit if you wheeled it in on a skateboard,” he said. “It ain’t your property. Take your bad jokes and get lost, kid. Blow.”
My father was right—he was a wretch. And I would have been more than happy to blow; I could think of at least six thousand places I’d rather be on this second-to-last day of my summer vacation. Even the Black Hole of Calcutta would have been an improvement. Not a big one, maybe, yet an improvement, all the same. But the car bothered me. A lot of little things, all adding up to a big itch that needed to be scratched. Be his eyes, my father had said, and that sounded good. The problem was I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
“My name is Dennis Guilder,” I said. “My dad used to do your books, didn’t he?”
He looked at me for a long time with no expression at all in his cold little pig eyes, and I was suddenly sure he was going to tell me he didn’t give a fuck who my father was, that I’d better blow and let these working men go about the business of fixing their cars so they could go on putting bread on their tables. Et cetera.
Then he smiled—but the smile didn’t touch his eyes at all. “You’re Kenny Guilder’s boy?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
He patted the hood of Arnie’s car with one pale, fat hand—there were two rings on it, and one of them looked like a real diamond. Still, what does a kid like me know?
“I guess you’re straight enough, then. If you’re Kenny’s kid.” There was a second when I thought he was going to ask for some identification.
The two guys next to us had gone back to work on their camper, apparently having decided nothing interesting was going to transpire.
“Come on into the office and let’s have a talk,” he said, then turned away and moved across the floor without even a glance backward. That I would comply was taken for granted. He moved like a ship under full sail, his white shirt billowing, the girth of his hips and backside amazing, improbable. Very fat people always affect me that way, with a feeling of distinct improbability, as if I were looking at a very good optical illusion—but then, I come from a long line of skinny people. For my family I’m a heavyweight.
He paused here and there on his way back to his office, which had a glass wall looking out onto the garage. He reminded me a little bit of Moloch, the god we read about in my Origins of Literature class—he was the one who was supposed to be able to see everywhere with his one red eye. Darnell bawled at one guy to get the hose on his tailpipe before he threw him out; yelled something to another guy about how “Nicky’s back was acting up on him again” (this inspired a fuming, ferocious burst of laughter from both of them); hollered at another guy to pick up those fucking Pepsi-Cola cans, was he born in a dump? Apparently Will Darnell didn’t know anything about what my mother always called “a normal tone of voice.”
After a moment’s hesitation, I followed him. Curiosity killed the cat, I suppose.
• • •
His office was done in Early American Carburetor—it was every scuzzy garage office from coast to coast in a country that runs on rubber and amber gold. There was a greasy calendar with a pin-up of a blond goddess in short-shorts and an open blouse climbing over a fence in the country. There were unreadable plaques from half a dozen companies which sold auto parts. Stacks of ledgers. An ancient adding machine. There was a photograph, God save us, of Will Darnell wearing a Shriner’s fez and mounted on a miniature motorcycle that looked about to collapse under his bulk. And there was the smell of long-departed cigars and sweat.
Darnell sat down in a swivel chair with wooden arms. The cushion wheezed beneath him. It sounded tired but resigned.
He leaned back. He took a match from the hollow head of a ceramic Negro jockey. He struck it on a strip of sandpaper that ran along the edge of his desk and fired up the wet stub of cigar. He coughed long and hard, his big, loose chest heaving up and down. Directly behind him, tacked to the wall, was a picture of Garfield the Cat. “Want a trip to Loose-Tooth City?” Garfield was inquiring over one cocked paw. It seemed to sum up Will Darnell, Wretch in Residence, perfectly.
“Want a Pepsi, kid?”
“No, thank you,” I said, and sat down in the straight chair opposite him.
He looked at me—that cold look of appraisal again—and then nodded. “How’s your dad, Dennis? His ticker still okay?”
“He’s fine. When I told him Arnie had his car here, he remembered you right off. He says Bill Upshaw’s doing your figures now.”
“Yeah. Good man. Good man. Not as good as your dad, but good.”
I nodded. A silence fell between us, and I began to feel uneasy. Will Darnell didn’t look uneasy; he didn’t look anything at all. That cold look of appraisal never changed.
“Did your buddy send you to find out if Repperton was really gone?” he asked me, so suddenly that I jumped.
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
“Well, you tell him he is,” Darnell went on, ignoring what I’d just said. “Little wiseass. I tell em when they run their junk in here: get along or get out. He was working for me, doing a little of this and a little of that, and I guess he thought he had the gold key to the crapper or something. Little wiseass punk.”
He started coughing again, and it was a long time before he stopped. It was a sick sound. I was beginning to feel claustrophobic in the office, even with the window looking out on the garage.
“Arnie’s a good boy,” Darnell said presently, still measuring me with his eyes. Even while he was coughing, that expression hadn’t changed. “He’s picked up the slack real good.”
Doing what? I wanted to ask, and just didn’t dare.
Darnell told me anyway. Cold glance aside, he was apparently feeling expansive. “Sweeps the floor, takes the crap out of the garage bays at the end of the day, keeps the tools inventoried, along with Jimmy Sykes. Have to be careful with tools around here, Dennis. They got a way of walkin away when your back’s turned.” He laughed, and the laugh turned into a wheeze. “Got him started strippin parts out back, as well. He’s got good hands. Good hands and bad taste in cars. I ain’t seen such a dog as that ’58 in years.”
“Well, I guess he sees it as a hobby,” I said.
“Sure,” Darnell said expansively. “Sure he does. Just as long as he doesn’t want to ramrod around with it like that punk, that Repperton. But not much chance of that for a while, huh?”
“I guess not. It looks pretty wasted.”
“What the fuck is he doing to it?” Darnell asked. He leaned forward suddenly, his big shoulders going up all the way to his hairline. His brows pulled in, and his eyes disappeared except for small twin gleams. “What the fuck is he up to? I been in this business all my life, and I never seen anyone go at fixing a car up the crazy-ass way he is. Is it a joke? A game?”
“I’m not getting you,” I said, although I was—I was getting him perfectly.
“Then I’ll draw you a pitcher,” Darnell said. “He brings it in, and at first he’s doing all the things I’d expect him to do. What the fuck, he ain’t got money falling out of his asshole, right? If he did, he wouldn’t be here. He changes the oil. He changes the filter. Grease-job, lube, I see one day he’s got two new Firestones for the front to go with the two on the back.”
Two on the back? I wondered, and then decided he’d just bought three new tires to go with the original new one I’d gotten the night we were bringing it over here.
“Then I come in one day and see he’s replaced the windshield wipers,” Darnell co
ntinued. “Not so strange, except that the car’s not going to be going anywhere—rain or shine—for a long time. Then it’s a new antenna for the radio, and I think, He’s gonna listen to the radio while he’s working on it and drain his battery. Now he’s got one new seat cover and half a grille. So what is it? A game?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Did he buy the replacement parts from you?”
“No,” Darnell said, sounding aggravated. “I don’t know where he gets them. That grille—there isn’t a spot of rust on it. He must have ordered it from somewhere. Custom Chrysler in New Jersey or someplace like that. But where’s the other half? Up his ass? I never even heard of a grille that came in two pieces.”
“I don’t know. Honest.”
He jammed the cigar out. “Don’t tell me you’re not curious, though. I saw the way you was lookin at that car.”
I shrugged. “Arnie doesn’t talk about it much,” I said.
“No, I bet he doesn’t. He’s a close-mouthed sonofabitch. He’s a fighter, though. That Repperton pushed the wrong button when he started in on Cunningham. If he works out okay this fall, I might find a steady job for him this winter. Jimmy Sykes is a good boy, but he ain’t much in the brains department.” His eyes measured me. “Think he’s a pretty good worker, Dennis?”
“He’s okay.”
“I got a lot of irons in the fire,” he said. “Lot of irons. I rent out flatbeds to guys that need to haul their stockers up to Philadelphia City. I haul away the junkers after races. I can always use help. Good, trustworthy help.”
I began to have a horrid suspicion that I was being asked to dance. I got up hurriedly, almost knocking over the straight chair. “I really ought to get going,” I said. “And … Mr. Darnell … I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention to Arnie that I was here. He’s … a little touchy about the car. To tell you the truth, his father was curious about how he was coming along.”
“Took a little shit on the home front, did he?” Darnell’s right eye closed shrewdly in something that was not quite a wink. “Folks ate a few pounds of Ex-Lax and then stood over him with their legs spread, did they?”