The heater blew warm air gently around his legs, negating the winter chill outside.
It seemed to him that there were things Leigh could not understand, things she could never understand. Because she hadn’t been around. The pimples. The cries of Hey Pizza-Face! The wanting to speak, the wanting to reach out to other people, and the inability. The impotence. It seemed to him that she couldn’t understand the simple fact that, had it not been for Christine, he never would have had the courage to call her on the phone even if she had gone around with I WANT TO DATE ARNIE CUNNINGHAM tattooed on her forehead. She couldn’t understand that he sometimes felt thirty years older than his age—no! more like fifty! and not a boy at all but some terribly hurt veteran back from an undeclared war.
He caressed the steering wheel. The green cats” eyes of the dash instruments glowed back at him comfortingly.
“Okay,” he said. Almost sighed.
He dropped the gearshift into big D and flicked on the radio. Dee Dee Sharp singing “Mashed Potato Time'; mystic nonsense on the radio waves coming out of the dark.
He pulled out, planning to head for the airport, where he would park his car and catch the bus that ran back to town on the hour. And he did that, but not in time to take the 11:00 p.m. bus as he had intended. He took the midnight bus instead, and it was not until he was in bed that night recalling Leigh’s warm kisses instead of the way Christine wouldn’t fire up, that it occurred to him that somewhere that evening, after leaving the Cabot house and before arriving at the airport, he had lost an hour. It was so obvious that he felt like a man who has turned the house upside down looking for a vital bit of correspondence, only to discover that he has been holding it in his other hand all along. Obvious… and a little scary.
Where had he been?
He had a blurry memory of drawing away from the kerb in front of Leigh’s and then just…
… just cruising.
Yeah. Cruising. That was all. No big deal.
Cruising through the thickening sleet, cruising empty streets that were plated with the stuff, cruising without snow tyres (and yet Christine, incredibly surefooted, never missed her way or skidded around a corner, Christine seemed to find the safe and secure way as if by magic, the ride as solid as it would have been if the car had been on trolley-tracks), cruising with the radio on, spilling out a constant stream of oldies that seemed to consist solely of girls” names: Peggy Sue, Carol, Barbara-Ann, Susie Darlin”.
It seemed to him that at some point he had gotten a little frightened and had punched one of the chrome buttons on the converter he’d installed, but instead of FM-104 and the Block Party Weekend he got WDIL all over again, only now the disc jockey sounded crazily like Alan Freed, and the voice that followed was that of Screamin” Jay Hawkins, hoarse and chanting: “I put a spell on youuu… because you’re miiiiiine…”
And then at last there had been the airport with its foul-weather lights pulsing sequentially like a visible heartbeat. Whatever had been on the radio faded to a meaningless jumble of static and he had turned it off. Getting out of the car he had felt a sweaty, incomprehensible sort of relief.
Now he lay in bed, needing to sleep but unable, The sleet had thickened and curdled into fat white splats of snow.
It wasn’t right.
Something had been started, something was going on. He couldn’t even lie to himself and say that he didn’t know about it. The car—Christine—several people had commented on how beautifully he had restored her. He had driven it to school and the kids from auto shop were all over it; they were underneath it on crawlers to look at the new exhaust system, the new shocks, the bodywork. They were waist-deep in the engine compartment, checking out the belts and the radiator, which was miraculously free of the corrosion and the green gunk that is the residue of years of antifreeze, checking out the generator and the tight, gleaming pistons socketed in their valves. Even the air cleaner was new, with the numbers 318 painted across-the top, raked backward to indicate speed.
Yes, he had become something of a hero to his fellow shoppies, and he had taken all the comments and the compliments with just the night deprecatory grin. But even then, hadn’t the confusion been there, somewhere deep inside? Sure.
Because he couldn’t remember what he had done to Christine and what he hadn’t.
