Christine полностью

We goofed around the croquet course for a while, not really playing, just whopping the Jesus out of each other’s balls. Finally, one went through the hedge into the Blackfords” yard, and after I crawled through to get it, neither of us wanted to play anymore. We sat down in the lawn chairs. Pretty soon our cat, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Captain Beefheart’s replacement, came creeping out from under the porch, probably hoping to find some cute little chipmunk to murder slowly and nastily. His amber-green eyes glinted in the afternoon light, which was overcast and muted.

“Thought you’d be over for the game yesterday,” I said. “It was a good one.”

“I was at Darnell’s,” he said. “Heard it on the radio, though.” His voice went up three octaves and he did a very good imitation of my grandad. “They roont em! They roont em, Denny!”

I laughed and nodded. There was something about him that day—perhaps it was only the light, which was bright enough but still somehow gloomy and spare—something that looked different. He looked tired, for one thing there were circles under his eyes—but at the same time his complexion seemed a trifle better than it had been lately. He had been drinking a lot of Cokes on the job, knowing he shouldn’t, of course, but unable to help succumbing to temptation from time to time. His skin problems tended to go in cycles, as most teenagers” do, depending on their moods—except in Arnie’s case, the cycles were usually from bad to worse and back to bad again.

Or maybe it was just the light.

“What’d you do on it?” I asked.

“Not much. Changed the oil. Looked the block over. It’s” not cracked, Dennis, that’s one thing. LeBay or somebody left the drain plug out somewhere along the line, that’s all. A lot of the old oil had leaked out. I was lucky not to fry a piston driving it Friday night.”

“How’d you get lift-time? I thought you had to reserve that in advance.”

His eyes shifted away from mine. “No problem there,” he said, but there was deception in his voice. “I ran a couple of errands for Mr Darnell.”

I opened my mouth to ask what errands, and then I decided I didn’t want to hear. Probably the “couple of errands” boiled down to no more than running around the corner to Schirmer’s Luncheonette and bringing back coffee-and for the regulars or crating up various used auto parts for later sale, but I didn’t want to be involved in the Christine end of Arnie’s life, and that included how he was getting along (or not getting along) down at Darnell’s Garage

Andthere was something else—a feeling of letting go. I eithercouldn’t define that feeling very well back then or didn’twant to. Now I guess I’d say it’s the way you feel when a friend of yours falls in love and marries a right high-riding, dyed-in-the-wool bitch. You don’t like the bitch and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the bitch doesn’t like you, so you just close the door on that room of your friendship. When the thing is done, you either let go of the subject… or you find your friend letting go of you, usually with the bitch’s enthusiastic approval.

“Let’s go to the movies,” Arnie said restlessly.

“What’s on?”

“Well, there’s one of those gross Kung-fu movies down at the State Twin, how does that sound? Heee-yah!” He pretended to administer a savage karate kick to Screaming Jay Hawkins, and Screaming Jay took off like a shot.

“Sounds pretty good. Bruce Lee?”

“Nah, some other guy.”

“What’s it called?”

“I don’t know. Fists of Danger. Flying Hands of Death. Or maybe it was Genitals of Fury, I don’t know. What do you say? We can come back and tell the gross parts to Ellie and make her puke.”

“All right,” I said. “If we can still get in for a buck each.”

“Yeah, we can until three.”

“Let’s go.”

We went. It turned out to be a Chuck Norris movie, not bad at all. And on Monday we went back to building the Interstate extension. I forgot about my dream. Gradually I realized that I wasn’t seeing as much of Arnie as I used to; again, it was the way you seem to fall out of touch with a guy who has just gotten married. Besides, my thing with the cheerleader began to heat up around then. My thing was heating up, all right—more than one night I brought her home from the submarine races at the drive-in with my balls throbbing so badly I could barely walk.

Arnie, meanwhile, was spending most of his evenings at Darnell’s.

Our last full week of work before school started was the week before Labor Day. When I pulled up to Arnie’s house to pick him up that morning, he came out with a great big blue-black shiner around one eye and an ugly scrape upside his face.

“What happened to you?”