that in her I was seeing something terribly similar to those magic miracle
pictures.
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
it. Then I realised that it was probably inside.
But this was something else entirely.
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 windscreen 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 windscreen; 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 windscreen, 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 a 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 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.
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