Christine

by Steven King

  “All right,” he said. “I guess I see what you mean. I don’t know why you want to let her push you around like that, but okay.”

  The sad, humiliated grin remained, a little like the grin of a dog that has chased a woodchuck a long piece on a hot summer day. “Maybe some things get to be a way of life. And maybe there are compensations that you can’t understand and I can’t explain. Like … well, I love her, you know.”

  Arnie shrugged. “So . .. what now?”

  “Can we go for a ride?”

  Arnie looked surprised, then pleased. “Sure. Hop in. Any place in particular?”

  “The airport.”

  Arnie’s eyebrows went up. “The airport? Why?”

  “I’ll tell you as we go.”

  “What about Regina?”

  “Your mother’s gone to bed,” Michael said quietly, and Arnie had the good grace to flush a little himself.

  • • •

  Arnie drove firmly and well. Christine’s new sealed-beam headlights cut the early dark in a clean, deep tunnel of light. He passed the Guilders’ house, then turned left onto Elm Street at the stop sign and started out toward JFK Drive. I-376 took them to I-278 and then out toward the airport. Traffic was light. The engine muttered softly through new pipes. The dashboard instrument panel glowed a mystic green.

  Arnie turned on the radio and found WDIL, the AM station from Pittsburgh that plays only oldies. Gene Chandler was chanting “The Duke of Earl.”

  “This thing runs like a dream,” Michael Cunningham said. He sounded awed.

  “Thanks,” Arnie said, smiling.

  Michael inhaled deeply. “It smells new.”

  “A lot of it is. These seat covers set me back eighty bucks. Part of the money Regina was bitching about. I went to the library and got a lot of books and tried to copy everything the best I could. But it hasn’t been as easy as people might think.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, the ’58 Plymouth Fury wasn’t anybody’s idea of a classic car, so no one wrote much about it, even in the car retrospective volumes—American Car, American Classics, Cars of the 1950s, things like that. The ’58 Pontiac was a classic, only the second year Pontiac made the Bonneville model; and the ’58 T-Bird with the rabbit-ear fins, that was the last really great Thunderbird, I think; and—”

  “I had no idea you knew so much about old cars,” Michael said. “How long have you been harboring this interest, Arnie?”

  He shrugged vaguely. “Anyway, the other problem was just that LeBay himself customized the original Detroit rolling stock—Plymouth didn’t offer a Fury in red and white, for one thing—and I’ve been trying to restore the car more the way he had it than the way Detroit meant it to be. So I’ve just been sort of flying by the seat of my pants.”

  “Why do you want to restore it the way LeBay had it?”

  That vague shrug again. “I don’t know. It just seems like the right thing to do.”

  “Well, I think you’re doing a hell of a job.”

  “Thank you.”

  His father leaned toward him, looking at the instrument panel.

  “What are you looking at?” Arnie asked, a little sharply.

  “I’ll be damned,” Michael said. “I’ve never seen that before.”

  “What?” Arnie glanced down. “Oh. The odometer.”

  “It’s running backward, isn’t it?”

  The odometer was indeed running backward; at that time, on the evening of November 1, it read 79,500 and some-odd miles. As Michael watched, the tenths-of-a-mile indicator rolled from .2 to .1 to 0. As it went back to .9, the actual miles slipped back by one.

  Michael laughed. “That’s one thing you missed, son.”

  Arnie smiled—a small smile. “That’s right,” he said. “Will says there’s a wire crossed in there someplace. I don’t think I’ll fool with it. It’s sort of neat, having an odometer that runs backward.”

  “Is it accurate?”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, if you go from our house to Station Square, would it subtract five miles from the total?”

  “Oh,” Arnie said. “I get you. No, it’s not accurate at all. Turns back two or three miles for every actual mile travelled. Sometimes more. Sooner or later the speedometer cable will break, and when I replace that, it’ll take care of itself.”

  Michael, who had had a speedometer cable or two break on him in his time, glanced at the needle for the characteristic jitter that indicated trouble there. But the needle hung dead still just above forty. The speedometer seemed fine; it was only the odometer that had gotten funky. And did Arnie really believe that the speedometer and odometer ran off the same cables? Surely not.

  He laughed and said, “That’s weird, son.”

  “Why the airport?” Arnie asked.

  “I’m going to treat you to a thirty-day parking stub,” Michael said. “Five dollars. Cheaper than Darnell’s garage. And you can get your car out whenever you want it. The airport’s a regular stop on the bus run. End of the line, in fact.”

  “Holy Christ, that’s the craziest thing I ever heard!” Arnie shouted. He pulled into the turnaround drive of a darkened dry cleaner’s shop. “I’m to take the bus twenty miles out to the airport to get my car when I need it? It’s like something out of Catch-22! No! No way!”

  He was about to say something more, when he was suddenly grabbed by the neck.

  “You listen,” Michael said. “I’m your father, so you listen to me. Your mother was right, Arnie. You’ve gotten unreasonable—more than unreasonable—in the last couple of months. You’ve gotten downright peculiar.”

  “Let go of me,” Arnie said, struggling in his father’s grip.

  Michael didn’t let go, but he loosened up. “I’ll put it in perspective for you,” he said. “Yes, the airport is a long way to come, but the same quarter that would take you to Darnell’s will take you out here. There are parking garages closer in, but there are more incidents of theft and vandalism in the city. The airport is, by contrast, quite safe.”

  “No public parking lot is safe.”

  “Second, it’s cheaper than a downtown garage and much cheaper than Darnell’s.”

  “That’s not the point, and you know it!”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Michael said. “But you’re missing something too, Arnie. You’re missing the real point.”

  “Well suppose you tell me what the real point is.”

  “All right. I will.” Michael paused for a moment, looking steadily at his son. When he spoke his voice was low and even, almost as musical as his recorder. “Along with any sense of what is reasonable, you seem to have totally lost your sense of perspective. You’re almost eighteen, in your last year at public school. I think you’ve made up your mind not to go to Horlicks; I’ve seen the college brochures you’ve brought home—”

  “No, I’m not going to Horlicks,” Arnie said. He sounded a little calmer now. “Not after all of this. You have no idea how badly I want to get away. Or maybe you do.”

  “Yes. I do. And maybe that’s best. Better than this constant abrasion between you and your mother. All I ask is that you not tell her yet; wait until you have to submit the application papers.”

  Arnie shrugged, promising nothing either way.

  “You’ll be taking your car to school, that is if it’s still running—”

  “It’ll be running.”

  “—and if it’s a school that allows freshmen to have cars on campus.”

  Arnie turned toward his father, surprised out of his smouldering anger—surprised and uneasy. This was a possibility he had never considered.

  “I won’t go to a school that says I can’t have my wheels,” he said. His tone was one of patient instruction, the sort of voice an instructor with a class of mentally retarded children might use.

  “You see?” Michael asked. “She’s right. Basing your choice of a college on the school’s policy concerning freshmen and cars is totally irrationa
l. You’ve gotten obsessed with this car.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  Michael pressed his lips together for a moment.

  “Anyway, what’s running out to the airport on the bus to pick up your car, if you want to take Leigh out? It’s an inconvenience, granted, but not really a major one. It means you won’t use it unless you have to, for one thing, and you’ll save gas money. Your mother can have her little victory; she won’t have to look at it.” Michael paused and then smiled his sad grin again. “She doesn’t see it as money flying away, both of us know that. She sees it as your first decisive step away from her … from us. I guess she … oh, shit, I don’t know.”

  He stopped, looking at his son. Arnie looked back thoughtfully.

  “Take it to college with you; even if you choose a campus that doesn’t allow freshmen to have cars on campus, there are ways to get around—”

  “Like parking it at the airport?”

  “Yes. Like that. When you come home for weekends, Regina will be so glad to see you she’ll never mention the car. Hell, she’ll probably get out there in the driveway and help you wash it and Turtlewax it just so she can find out what you’re doing. Ten months. Then it’ll be over. We can have peace in the family again. Go on, Arnie. Drive.”

  Arnie pulled out of the dry cleaner’s and back into traffic.

  “Is this thing insured?” Michael asked abruptly.

  Arnie laughed. “Are you kidding? If you don’t have liability insurance in this state and you get in an accident, the cops kill you. Without liability, it’d be your fault even if the other car fell out of the sky and landed on top of you. It’s one of the ways the shitters keep kids off the roads in Pennsylvania.”

  Michael thought of telling Arnie that a disproportionate number of fatal accidents in Pennsylvania—41 percent—involved teenage drivers (Regina had read the statistic to him as part of a Sunday supplement article, rolling that figure out in slow, apocalyptic tones: “For-ty-one percent!” shortly after Arnie bought his car), and decided it wasn’t anything Arnie would want to hear… not in his present mood.

  “Just liability?”

  They were passing under a reflecting sign which read LEFT LANE FOR AIRPORT. Arnie put on his blinker and changed lanes. Michael seemed to relax a little.

  “You can’t get collision insurance until you’re twenty-one. I mean that; those shitting insurance companies are all as rich as Croesus, but they won’t cover you unless the odds are stacked outrageously in their favor.” There was a bitter, somehow weakly peevish note in Arnie’s voice that Michael had never heard before, and although he said nothing, he was startled and a little dismayed by his son’s choice of words—he had assumed Arnie used that sort of language with his peers (or so he later told Dennis Guilder, apparently totally unaware of the fact that, up until his senior year, Arnie had really had no peers except for Guilder), but he had never used it in front of Regina and himself.

  “Your driving record and whether or not you had driver ed don’t have anything to do with it,” Arnie went on. “The reason you can’t get collision is because their fucking actuarial tables say you can’t get collision. You can get it at twenty-one only if you’re willing to spend a fortune—usually the premiums end up being more than the car books for until you’re twenty-three or so, unless you’re married. Oh, the shitters have got it all figured out. They know how to walk it right to you, all right.”

  Up ahead the airport lights glowed, runways outlined in mystic parallels of blue light. “If anyone ever asks me what the lowest form of human life is, I’ll tell them it’s an insurance agent.”

  “You’ve made quite a study of it,” Michael commented. He didn’t quite dare to say anything else; Arnie seemed only waiting to fly into a fresh rage.

  “I went around to five different companies. In spite of what Mom said, I’m not anxious to throw my money away.”

  “And straight liability was the best you could do?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Six hundred and fifty dollars a year.”

  Michael whistled.

  “That’s right,” Arnie agreed.

  Another twinkling sign, advising that the two left-hand lanes were for parking, the right lanes for departures. At the entrance to the parking lot, the way split again. To the right was an automated gate where you took a ticket for short-term parking. To the left was the glass booth where the parking-lot attendant sat, watching a small black-and-white TV and smoking a cigarette.

  Arnie sighed. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe this is the best solution all the way around.”

  “Of course it is,” Michael said, relieved. Arnie sounded more like his old self now, and that hard light had died out of his eyes at last. “Ten months, that’s all.”

  “Sure.”

  He drove up to the booth, and the attendant, a young guy in a black-and-orange high school sweater with the Libertyville logo on the pockets, pushed back the glass partition and leaned out. “Help ya?”

  “I’d like a thirty-day ticket,” Arnie said, digging for his wallet.

  Michael put his hand over Arnie’s. “This one’s my treat,” he said.

  Arnie pushed his hand away gently but firmly and took his wallet out. “It’s my car,” he said. “I’ll pay my own way.”

  “I only wanted—” Michael began.

  “I know,” Arnie said. “But I mean it.”

  Michael sighed. “I know you do. You and your mother. Everything will be fine if you do it my way.”

  Arnie’s lips tightened momentarily, and then he smiled. “Well… yeah,” he said.

  They looked at each other and both burst out laughing.

  At the instant that they did, Christine stalled. Up until then the engine had been ticking over with unobtrusive perfection. Now it just quit; the oil and amp idiot lights came on.

  Michael raised his eyebrows. “Say what?”

  “I don’t know,” Arnie answered, frowning. “It never did that before.”

  He turned the key, and the engine started at once.

  “Nothing, I guess,” Michael said.

  “I’ll want to check the timing later in the week,” Arnie muttered. He gunned the engine and listened carefully. And in that instant, Michael thought that Arnie didn’t look like his son at all. He looked like someone else, someone much older and harder. He felt a brief but extremely nasty lance of fear in his chest.

  “Hey, do you want this ticket or are you just gonna sit there all night talkin about your timing?” the parking-lot attendant asked. He looked vaguely familiar to Arnie, the way people do when you’ve seen them moving around in the corridors at school but don’t have anything else to do with them.

  “Oh yeah. Sorry.” Arnie passed him a five-dollar bill, and the attendant gave him a time-ticket.

  “Back of the lot,” the attendant said. “Be sure to revalidate it five days before the end of the month if you want the same space again.”

  “Right.”

  Arnie drove to the back of the lot, Christine’s shadow growing and shrinking as they passed under the hooded sodium-arc lights. He found a vacant space and backed Christine in. As he turned off the key, he grimaced and put a hand to his lower back.

  “That still bothering you?” Michael asked.

  “Only a little,” Arnie said. “I was almost over it, and it came back on me yesterday. I must have lifted something wrong. Don’t forget to lock your door.”

  They got out and locked up. Once out of the car, Michael felt better—he felt closer to his son, and, maybe just as important, he felt less that he had played the impotent fool with his jingling cap of bells in the argument that had taken place earlier. Once out of the car, he felt as if he might have salvaged something—maybe a lot—out of the night.

  “Let’s see how fast that bus really is,” Arnie said, and they began to walk across the parking lot toward the terminal, companionably close together.

  Michael had formed an opinion of Christine on the ride out
to the airport. He was impressed with the job of restoration Arnie had done, but he disliked the car itself—disliked it intensely. He supposed it was ridiculous to hold such feelings about an inanimate object, but the dislike was there all the same, big and unmistakable, like a lump in the throat.

  The source of the dislike was impossible to isolate. It had caused bitter trouble in the family, and he supposed that was the real reason … but it wasn’t all. He hadn’t liked the way Arnie seemed when he was behind the wheel: somehow arrogant and petulant at the same time, like a weak king. The impotent way he had railed about the insurance … his use of that ugly and striking word “shitters” … even the way the car had stalled when they laughed together.

  And it had a smell. You didn’t notice it right away, but it was there. Not the smell of new seat covers, that was quite pleasant; this was an undersmell, bitter, almost (but not quite) secret. It was an old smell. Well, Michael told himself, the car is old, why in God’s name do you expect it to smell new? And that made undeniable sense. In spite of the really fantastic job Arnie had done of restoring it, the Fury was twenty years old. That bitter, mouldy smell might be coming from old carpeting in the trunk, or old matting under the new floormats; perhaps it was coming from the original padding under the bright new seat covers. Just a smell of age.

  And yet that undersmell, low and vaguely sickening, bothered him. It seemed to come and go in waves, sometimes very noticeable, at other times completely undetectable. It seemed to have no specific source. At its worst, it smelled like the rotting corpse of some small animal—a cat, a woodchuck, maybe a squirrel—that had gotten into the trunk or maybe crawled up into the frame and then died there.

  Michael was proud of what his son had accomplished … and very glad to get out of his son’s car.

  22

  Sandy

  The parking-lot attendant that night—every night from six until ten, as a matter of fact—was a young man named Sandy Galton, the only one of Buddy Repperton’s close circle of hoodlum friends who had not been in the smoking area on the day Repperton had been expelled from school. Arnie didn’t recognize him, but Galton recognized Arnie.