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Christine reversed, screeched to a skidding, sliding stop, and roared forward
again. Moochie lay near the curbing, trying to get up. He couldn't get up.
Nothing seemed to work. All the signals were scrambled.
Bright white light washed over him.
"No," he whispered through a mouthful of broken teeth. "N—"
The car roared forward and over him. Change flew everywhere. Mooche
was pulled and rolled first one way and then the other as Christine reversed
into the street again. She stood there, engine revving and falling off to a rich
idle, then revving again. She stood there as if thinking.
Then she came at him again. She hit him, jumped the curb, skidded around,
and then reversed again, thumping back down.
She screamed forward.
And back.
And forward.
Her headlights glared. Her exhaust pipes jetted hot blue smoke.
The thing in the street no longer looked like a human being; it looked like a
scattered bundle of rags.
The car reversed a final time, skidded around in a half-circle, and
accelerated, roaring over the bleeding bundle in the street again and going
down the Drive, the blast of its engine, still winding up to full rev, rocketing
off the walls of the sleeping buildings—but not entirely sleeping now; lights
were beginning to flick on, people who lived over their stores were going to
their windows to see what all the racket had been about, and if there had
been an accident.
One of Christine's headlights had been shattered. Another flickered
unsteadily off and on, bleared with a thin wash of Moochie's blood. The
grille had been bent inward, and the dents in it approximated the shape and
size of Moochie's torso with all the gruesome perfection of a deathmask.
Blood was splashed across the hood in fans that spread out as windspeed
increased. The exhaust had taken on a heavy, blatting sound; one of
Christine's two silencers had been destroyed.
Inside, on the instrument panel, the odometer continued to run backward, as if
Christine were somehow slipping back into time, leaving not only the scene
of the hit-and-run behind but the actual
fact
of the hit-and-run.
The silencer was the first thing.
Suddenly that heavy, blatting sound diminished and smoothed out.
The fans of blood on the hood began to run toward the front of the car again
in spite of the wind—as if a movie film had been reversed.
The flickering headlight suddenly shone steadily, and a tenth of a mile later
the deadlight became a headlight again. With an unimportant tinkling sound—
no more than the sound of a small boy's boot breaking the thin scum of ice on
a mudpuddle—the glass reassembled itself from nowhere.
There was a hollow
punk! punk! punk!
sound from the front end, the sound of
denting metal, the sound you sometimes get when you squeeze a beer-can. But
instead of denting, Christine's grille was popping back out—a bodyshop
veteran with fifty years' experience in putting fender-benders right could not
have done it more neatly.
Christine turned onto Hampton Street even before the first of those awakened
by the screaming of her tires had reached Moochie's remains. The blood was
gone. It had reached the front of the hood and disappeared. The scratches
were gone. As she rolled quietly toward the garage door with its HONK
FOR ENTRY sign, there was one final
punk!
as the last dimple—this one in
the left front bumper, the spot where Christine had struck Moochie's calf—
popped back out.
Christine looked like new.
The car stopped in front of the large garage door in the middle of the
darkened, silent building. There was a small plastic box clipped to the
driver's side sun-visor. This was a little doodad Will Darnell had given
Arnie when Arnie began to run cigarettes and booze over into New York
State for him—it was, perhaps, Darnell s version of a gold key to the
crapper.
In the still air the door-opener hummed briefly, and the garage door rattled
obediently up. Another circuit was made by the rising door, and a few
interior rights came on, burning weakly.
The headlight knob on the dashboard suddenly went in, and Christine's duals
went out. She rolled inside and whispered across the oil-stained concrete to
stall twenty. Behind her, the overhead door, which had been set on a thirty-
second timer, rolled back down. The light circuit was broken, and the garage
was dark again.
In Christine's ignition switch, the keys dangling down suddenly turned to the
left. The engine died. The leather patch with the initials R.D.L. branded into
it swung back and forth in decreasing arcs… and was finally still.
Christine sat in the dark, and the only sound in Darnell's Do-It-Yourself
Garage was the slow tick of her cooling engine.
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