-
Want that - !
Only boy elves make those, Lee-Lee my love-love. For boys. The nice girl elves make nice dolls -
I don't want a DOLL! I don't want a BARBIE! I . . . want . . . THAT!
If you're going to throw a tantrum, I'll have to take you home, Leigh. I mean it, now.
So she had submitted, and Christmas had brought her not only Malibu Barbie but also Malibu Ken, and she had enjoyed them (she supposed), but still she remembered the red Remco racing car on its green surface of painted hills, running without a cord along a painted road so perfect that there were even tiny metal guardrails - a road whose essential illusion was given away only by its pointless circularity. Ali, but it ran fast, that car, and was it bright red magic in her eye and her mind? It was. And the car's essential illusion was also magic. That illusion was somehow so captivating that it stole her heart. The illusion, of course, was that the car was driving itself. She knew that a store employee was really controlling it from a booth to the right, pushing buttons on a square wireless device. Her mother told her that was how it was happening, and so it must be so, but her eyes denied it,
Her heart denied it.
She stood fascinated, her small gloved hands on the rail of the display area, watching it race around and around, moving fast, driving itself, until her mother pulled her gently away.
And over everything, seeming to cause the very tinsel strung along the ceiling to vibrate, the ominous laughter of the department-store Santa.
Leigh slept more deeply, dreams and memories slowly fading, and outside daylight came creeping in like cold milk, illuminating a street that was Sunday-morning empty and Sunday-morning silent. The season's first fall of snow was unmarred except for the tyre tracks that swerved to the kerb in front of the Cabot house and then moved smoothly away again, toward the intersection at the end of this suburban block.
She didn't rise until nearly ten o'clock (her mother, who didn't believe in slugabeds, finally called for her to come down and have breakfast before lunch), and by then the day had already warmed up to nearly sixty degrees - in western Pennsylvania, early November is apt to be every bit as capricious as early April. So by ten o'clock the snow had melted. And the tracks were gone.
PART II: ARNIE - TEENAGE LOVE-SONGS Chapter 25 BUDDY VISTS THE AIRPORT
We shut 'em up and then we shut 'em down.
- Bruce Springsteen
One night some ten days later, as cardboard turkeys and construction-paper cornucopias were beginning to appear in grammar school windows, a blue Camaro, so radically jacked in the back that its nose seemed almost to scrape the road, slid into the long-term parking lane at the airport.
Sandy Galton looked out from his glass booth nervously. From the driver's side of the Ford the happy smiling face of Buddy Repperton tilted up toward him. Buddy's face was scrubbed with a week-old beard and his eyes held a maniacal glitter that was more cocaine than Thanksgiving cheer - he and the boys had scored a pretty good gram that evening. All in all, Buddy looked quite a bit like a depraved Clint Eastwood.
'How are they hanging, Sandy?' Buddy asked.
Dutiful laughter from the Camaro greeted this sally. Don Vandenberg, Moochie Welch, and Richie Trelawney were with Buddy, and between the gram of coke and the six bottles of Texas Driver Buddy had procured for the occasion, they were feeling pretty much reet and compleet. They had come to do a little dirty boogie on Arnie Cunningham's Plymouth.
'Listen, if you guys get caught, I'm gonna lose my job,' Sandy said nervously. He was the only one cold sober, and be was regretting ever having mentioned that Cunningham was parking his heap here. The thought that he might go to jail as well had fortunately not occurred to him.
'If you or any of your Mission Imfuckingpossible force are caught, the Secretary will disavow you ever fuckin lived,' Moochie said from the back seat, and there was more laughter.
Sandy looked around for other cars - witnesses - but there were no planes due for more than an hour and the parking lot was as deserted as the mountains of the moon. The weather had turned very cold, and a wind as keen as a fresh razor-blade whined across the runways and taxi-ways and hooted miserably