“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 he back of the lot, Christine’s shadow growing and shrinking as they passed under the hooded arc-sodium 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 boot, 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 boot-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.
First I walked past the Stop and Shop
Then I drove past the Stop and Shop.
I liked that much better when I drove past the Stop and Shop,
Cause I had the radio on.
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.
