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17 CHRISTINE ON THE STREET AGAIN
I got a 1966 cherry-red Mustang Ford
She got a 380 horsepower overload,
You know she's way too powerful
To be crawling on these Interstate roads.
— Chuck Berry
I didn't get a chance to really talk to Arnie until after the football game the
following Saturday. And that was also the first time since the day be had
bought her that Christine was out on the street.
The team went up to Hidden Hills, about sixteen miles away, on the quietest
school-activity bus ride I've ever been on. We might have been going to the
guillotine instead of to a football game. Even the fact that their record, 1-2,
was only slightly better than ours, didn't cheer anybody up much. Coach
Puffer sat in the seat behind the bus driver, pale and silent, as if he might be
suffering from a hangover.
Usually a trip to an away game was a combination caravan and circus. A
second bus, loaded up with the cheerleaders, the band, and all the LHS kids
who had signed up as "rooters" ("rooters", dear God! if we hadn't all been
through high school, who the hell would believe it?), trundled along behind
the team bus. Behind the two buses would be a line of fifteen or twenty cars,
most of them full of teenagers, most with THUMP 'EM TERRIERS bumper
stickers—beeping, flashing their lights, all that stuff you probably remember
from your own high school days.
But on this trip there was only the cheerleader/band bus (and that wasn't even
full—in a winning year if you didn't sign up for the second bus by Tuesday,
you were out of luck) and three or four cars behind that. The fair-weather
friends had already bailed out. And I was sitting on the team bus next to
Lenny Barongg, glumly wondering if I was going to get knocked out of my
jock that afternoon, totally unaware that one of the few cars behind the bus
today was Christine.
I saw it when we got out of the bus in the Hidden Hills High School parking
lot. Their band was already out on the field, and the thud from the big drum
came clearly, oddly magnified under the lowering, cloudy sky. It was going to
be the first really good Saturday for football, cool, overcast, and fallish.
Seeing Christine parked beside the band bus was surprise enough, but when
Arnie got out on one side and Leigh Cabot got out on the other, I was
downright stunned—and more than a little jealous. She was wearing a
clinging pair of brown woollen slacks and a white cableknit pullover, her
blond hair spilling gorgeously over her shoulders.
"Arnie," I said. "Hey, man!"
"Hi, Dennis," he said a little shyly.
I was aware that some of the players getting off the bus were also doing
double-takes; here was Pizza-Face Cunningham with the gorgeous transfer
from Massachusetts. How in God's name did
that
happen?
"How are you?"
"Good," he said, "Do you know Leigh Cabot?,
"From class," I said. "Hi, Leigh."
"Hi, Dennis. Are you going to win today?"
I lowered my voice to a hoarse whisper. "It's all been fixed. Bet your ass
off."
Arnie blushed a little at that, but Leigh cupped her hand to her mouth and
giggled.
"We're going to try, but I don't know," I said.
"We'll root you on to victory," Arnie said. "I can see it in tomorrow's paper
now—Guilder Becomes Airborne, Breaks Conference TD Record."
"Guilder Taken to Hospital with Fractured Skull, that's more likely," I said.
"How many kids came up? Ten? Fifteen?"
"More room on the bleachers for those of us that did," Leigh said. She took
Arnie's arm—surprising and pleasing him, I think. Already I liked her. She
could have been a bitch or mentally fast asleep—it seems to me that a lot of
really beautiful girls are one or the other—but she was neither.
"How's the rolling iron?" I asked, and walked over to the car.
"Not too bad." He followed me over, trying not to grin too widely.
The work had progressed, and now there was enough done on the Fury so
that it didn't look quite so crazy and helter-skelter. The other half of the old,
rusted front grille had been replaced, and the nest of cracks in the windscreen
was tot ally gone.
"You replaced the windscreen," I said.
Arnie nodded.
"And the bonnet."
The bonnet was clean; brand-spanking new, in sharp contrast to the rust-
flecked sides. It was a deep fire-engine red. Sharp-looking. Arnie touched it
possessively, and the touch turned into a caress.
"Yeah. I put that on myself.
Something about that jagged on me. He had done it
all
himself, hadn't he?
"You said you were going to turn it into a showpiece," I said. "I think I'm
starting to believe you." I walked around to the driver's side. The upholstery
on the insides of the doors and floor was still dirty and scuffed up, but now
the front seat cover had been replaced as well as the back one.
"It's going to be beautiful," Leigh said, but there was a flat note in her voice
—it wasn't as naturally bright and effervescent as it had been when we were
talking about the game—and that made me glance at her. A glance was all it
took. She didn't like Christine. I realized it just like that completely and
absolutely, as if I had plucked one of her brainwaves out of the air. She
would try to like the car because she liked Arnie. But… she wasn't ever
going to
really
like it.
"So you got it street-legal," I said.
"Well…" Arnie looked uncomfortable. "It isn't. Quite."
"What do you mean?"
"The horn doesn't work, and sometimes the tail-lights go out when I step on
the brake. It's a dead short somewhere, I think, but so far I haven't been able
to chase it out."
I glanced at the new windscreen—there was a new inspection sticker on it,
Arnie followed my glance and managed to look both embarrassed and a bit
truculent at the same time. "Will gave me my sticker. He knows it's ninety per
cent there."
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