Christine - Stephen King [182]
He lay on the cell bunk, his mouth dry, his heart beating rapidly in his chest.
You don't want to open your mouth. You don't want to frig with me
Of course, if Will tried something and got careless - if his concentration lapsed for even a moment - Christine would get him. But somehow Arnie didn't think Will would get careless.
The next day he had been taken back to Pennsylvania, charged, then bailed for a nominal sum. There would be a preliminary hearing in January, and there was already talk of a grand jury. The bust was front-page material across the state, although Arnie was only identified as 'a youth' whose name was 'being withheld by state and Federal authorities due to his minor status.'
Arnie's name was common enough knowledge in Libertyville, however. In spite of its new exurban sprawl of drive-ins, fast-food emporiums, and Bowl-a-Ramas, it was still a faculty town where a lot of people were living in other people's back pockets. These people, mostly associated with Horlicks University, knew who had been driving for Will Darnell and who had been arrested over the New York State line with a bootful of contraband cigarettes. It was Regina's nightmare.
Arnie went home in the custody of his parents - bailed for a thousand dollars - after a brief detour to jail. It was all nothing but a big shitting game of Monopoly, really. His parents had come up with the Get Out of Jail Free card. As expected.
'What are you smiling' about, Arnie?' Regina asked him. Michael was driving the wagon along at fast walking speed, looking through the swirls of snow for Steve and Vicky's ranchhouse.
'Was I smiling?'
'Yes,' she said, and touched her hair.
'I don't really remember,' he said remotely, and she took her hand away.
They had come home on Sunday and his parents had left him pretty much alone, either because they didn't know how to talk to him or because they were utterly disgusted with him or perhaps it was a combination of the two. He didn't give a crap which, and that was the truth. He felt washed out, exhausted, a ghost of himself. His mother had gone to bed and slept all that afternoon, after taking the telephone off the hook. His father puttered aimlessly in his workroom, running his electric planer periodically and then shutting it off.
Arnie sat in the living room watching a football playoff doubleheader, not knowing who was playing, not caring, content to watch the players run around, first in bright warm California sunshine, later in a mixture of rain and sleet that turned the playing field to churned-up mud and erased the lines.
Around six o'clock he dozed off.
And dreamed.
He dreamed again that night and the next, in the bed where he had slept since earliest childhood, the elm outside casting its old familiar shadow (a skeleton each winter that gained miraculous new flesh each May). These dreams were not like the dream of the giant Will looming over the slotcar track. He could not remember these dreams at all more than a few moments after waking. Perhaps that was just as well. A figure by the roadside; a fleshless finger tapping a decayed palm in a lunatic parody of instruction; an uneasy sense of freedom and escape? Yes, escape. Nothing else except
Yes, he escaped from these dreams and back into reality with one repeating image: he was behind the wheel of Christine, driving slowly through a howling blizzard, snow so thick that he could literally see no farther than the end of her hood. The wind was not a scream; it was a lower, more sinister sound a basso roar. Then the image had changed. The snow wasn't snow any longer; it was tickertape. The roar of the wind was the roar of a great crowd lining both sides of Fifth Avenue. They were cheering him. They were cheering Christine. They were cheering because he and Christine had had
Escaped.
Each time this confused dream retreated, he thought, When this is over I'm getting out. Getting out for sure. Going to drive to Mexico. And Mexico, as he imagined its steady sun and its rural quiet, seemed more real