Christine - Stephen King [62]
I looked around for Darnell and didn't see him any place No one took any particular notice of me, so I walked over to stall twenty where Christine sat, now pointing nose-out, just like I had every right in the world to be there. In the stall to the right, two fat guys in bowling league shirts were putting a camper cap on the back of a pickup truck that had seen better days. The stall on the other side was deserted.
As I approached Christine, I felt that chill coming back. There was no reason for it, but I seemed helpless to stop it - and without even thinking, I moved a bit to the left, toward the empty stall. I didn't want to be in front of her.
My first thought was that Arnie's complexion had improved in tandem with Christine's. My second thought was that he was making his improvements in a strangely haphazard way and Arnie was usually so methodical.
The twisted, broken aerial had been replaced with a straight new one that glimmered under the fluorescent bars. Half the Fury's front grille had been replaced; the other half was still flecked and pitted with rust. And there was something else.
I walked along her flank right to the rear bumper, frowning.
Well, it was on the other side, that's all, I thought.
So I walked around to the other side, and it wasn't there, either.
I stood by the back wall, still frowning, trying to remember. I was pretty sure that when we first saw her standing on LeBay's lawn, with a FOR SALE sign propped against her windscreen, there had been a good-sized rusty dent on one side or the other, near the rear end - the sort of deep dent that my grandfather always called a 'hoss-kick'. We'd be driving along the turnpike and we'd go by a car with a big dent in it somewhere and Grampy would say, 'Hey, Denny, take a look there! Hoss kicked that one!' My grandfather was the sort of guy who had a downhome phrase for everything.
I started to think I must have imagined it, and then gave my head a little shake. That was sloppy thinking. It had been there; I remembered it clearly. Just because it wasn't here now didn't mean it hadn't been then. Arnie had obviously knocked it out, and had done a damn good piece of bodywork covering it up.
Except
There was no sign that he had done anything. There was no primer paint, no grey body fill, no flaked paint. Just Christine's dull red and dirty white.
But it had been there, goddammit! A deep dimple filled with a snarl of rust, on one side or the other.
But it sure was gone now.
I stood there in the clatter and thud of tools and machinery and felt very alone and suddenly very scared. It was all wrong, it was all crazy. He had replaced the radio aerial when the exhaust was practically dragging on the ground. He had replaced one half of the grille but not the other. He had talked to me about doing a front-end job, but inside he had replaced the ripped and dusty back seat cover with a bright red new one. The front seat cover was still a dusty wreck with a spring peeking through the passenger side.
I didn't like it at all. It was crazy and it wasn't like Arnie.
Something came to me, a trace of memory, and without even thinking about it, I stood back and looked at the entire car - not just one thing here and one thing there, but everything. And I had it; it clicked into place, and the chill came back.
That night when we had brought it here. The flat tyre. The replacement. I had looked at that new tyre on that old car and thought it was as if a little bit of the old car had been scratched away and that the new car - fresh, resplendent, just off the assembly line in a year when Ike had been President and Batista had still been in charge of Cuba - was peeking through.
What I was seeing now was like that only instead of just a single new tyre, there were all sorts of things - the aerial, a wink of new chrome from the grille, one taillight that was a bright deep red, that new seat cover in the back.
In its turn, that brought back something else from childhood. Arnie and I had gone to Vacation Bible School together for two weeks each summer, and every