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36 BUDDY AND CHRISTINE
Well it's out there in the distance
And it's creeping up on me
I ain't got no resistance
Ain't nothing gonna set me free.
Even a man with one eye could see
Something bad is gonna happen to me…
— The Inmates
On Tuesday, December 12, the Terriers lost to the Buccaneers 54-48 in the
Libertyville High gym. Most of the fans went out into the still black cold of
the night not too disappointed: every sportswriter in the Pittsburgh area had
predicted another loss for the Terriers. The result could hardly be called an
upset. And there was Lenny Barongg for the Terriers fans to be proud of: he
scored a mind-boggling 34 points all by himself, setting a new school record.
Buddy Repperton, however,
was
disappointed.
Because he was, Richie Trelawney was also at great pains to be
disappointed. So was Bobby Stanton in the back seat.
In the few months since he had been ushered out of LHS, Buddy seemed to
have aged. Part of it was the beard. He looked less like Clint Eastwood and
more like some hard-drinking young actor's version of Captain Ahab. Buddy
had been doing a lot of drinking these last few weeks. He had been having
dreams so terrible he could barely remember them. He awoke sweaty and
trembling, feeling he had barely escaped some awful doom that ran dark and
quiet.
The booze cut them off, though. Cut them right off at the fucking knees.
Goddam right. Working nights and sleeping days, that's all it was.
He unrolled the window of his scuffed and dented Camaro, scooping in frigid
air, and tossed out an empty bottle. He reached back over his shoulder and
said, "Another Molotov cocktail, mess-sewer."
"Right on, Buddy," Bobby Stanton said respectfully, and slapped another
bottle of Texas Driver into Buddy's hand. Buddy had treated them to a case of
the stuff—enough to paralyse the entire Egyptian Navy, he said—after the
game.
He spun off the cap, steering momentarily with his elbows, and then gulped
down half the bottle. He handed it to Richie and uttered a long, froggy belch.
The Camaro's headlights cut Route 46, running northeast as straight as a
string through rural Pennsylvania. Snow-covered fields lay dreaming on
either side of the road, twinkling in a billion points of light that mimed the
stars in the black winter sky. He was headed—in a sort of casual, half-drunk
way—for Squantic Hills. Another destination might take his fancy in the
meantime, but if not, the Hills were a fine and private place to get high in
peace.
Richie passed the bottle back to Bobby again, who drank big even though he
hated the taste of Texas Driver. He supposed that when he got a little drunker,
he wouldn't mind the taste at all. He might be hung over and puking
tomorrow, but tomorrow was a thousand years away. Bobby was still excited
just to be with them; he was only a freshman, and Buddy Repperton, with his
near-mythic reputation for bigness and badness, was a figure he viewed with
mixed fear and awe.
"Fucking clowns," Buddy said morosely. "What a bunch of fucking clowns.
You call that a basketball game?"
"All a bunch of retards," Richie agreed. "Except for Barongg. Thirty-four
points, not too tacky."
"I hate that fucking spade," Buddy said, giving Richie a long, measuring,
drunken look. "You taking up for that jungle bunny?"
"No way, Buddy," Richie said promptly.
"Better not. I'll Barongg him."
"Which do you want first?" Bobby asked abruptly from the back seat. "The
good news or the bad news?"
"Bad news first," Buddy said. He was into his third bottle of Driver now and
feeling no pain—only an aggrieved anger. He had forgotten—at least for the
moment—that he had been expelled; he was concentrating only on the fact
that the old school team, that bunch of fucking retard assholes, had let him
down. "Always bad news first." The Camaro rolled northeast at sixty-five
over two-lane tar that was like a swipe of black paint across a hilly white
floor. The land had begun to rise slightly as they approached Squantic Hills.
"Well, the bad news is that a million Martians just landed in New York,"
Bobby said. "Now you wanna hear the good news?"
"There is no good news," Buddy said in a low, morose, grieving voice.
Richie would have liked to tell the kid you didn't try to cheer Buddy up when
he was in a mood like this; that only made it worse. The thing to do was to let
it run its course.
Buddy had been this way ever since Moochie Welch, that little four-eyes
panhandling dork, got run down by some psycho on JFK Drive.
"The good news is that they eat niggers and piss gasoline," Bobby said, and
roared with laughter. He laughed for quite a while before he realized he was
laughing alone. Then he shut up quickly. He glanced up and saw Buddy's
bloodshot eyes looking at him over the uppermost tendrils of his beard, and
that red, ferrety gaze in the rearview mirror gave him an unpleasant thrill of
fear. It occurred to Bobby Stanton that he might have shut up a minute or two
too late.
Behind them, distant, perhaps as much as three miles back, headlights
twinkled like insignificant yellow sparks in the night,
"You think that's funny?" Buddy asked. "You tell a fucking racist joke like that
and you think it's
funny?
You're a fucking bigot, you know that?"
Bobby's mouth dropped open. "But you said
"I said I didn't like
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