she turned to look at his face, secretly amused by his silently moving mouth,
Then, quite suddenly, his mouth stopped moving. He stopped walking, His eyes opened wider . . . and then seemed to bulge. His mouth began to twist, and the hand holding Leigh's suddenly clamped down ruthlessly, grinding her fingerbones painfully together.
'Arnie - '
The jet-roar was fading, but he seemed not to have heard. His hand clamped tighter. His mouth had slammed shut now, and it was knotted into an awful grimace of surprise and terror. She thought, He's having a heart attack . . . stroke . . . something.
'Arnie, what's wrong?' she cried. 'Arnie . . . ooowwwhoww, that hurts!'
For one unbearable moment the pressure on the hand he had been holding so lightly and lovingly just before increased until it seemed that the bones would actually splinter and break. The high colour in his cheeks was gone, and his skin was as leaden as a slate headstone.
He said one word - 'Christine!' - and suddenly let go of her. He ran, thumping his leg against the bumper of a Cadillac, spinning away, almost falling, catching himself, and running forward again.
She realized at last it was something about the car - the ear, the car, always it was the goddam car - and a bitter anger rose in her that was both total and despairing. For the first time she wondered if it would be possible to love him; if Arnie would allow it.
Her anger was quenched the instant she really looked . . . and saw.
Arnie ran to what remained of his car, hands out, and stopped so abruptly in front of it that the gesture seemed almost to be a horrified warding-off; the classic movie pose of the hit-and-run victim an instant before the lethal collision.
He stood that way for a moment, as if to stop the car, or the whole world. Then he lowered his arms. His adam's apple lurched up and down twice as he struggled to swallow something back - a moan, a cry - and then his throat seemed to lock solid, every muscle standing out, each cord standing out, even the blood-vessels standing out in perfect relief. It was the throat of a man trying to lift a piano.
Leigh walked slowly toward him. Her hand still throbbed, and tomorrow it would be swollen and virtually useless, but for now she had forgotten it. Her heart went out to him and seemed to find him; she felt his sorrow and shared it or it seemed to her that she did. It was only later that she realized how much Arnie shut her out that day - how much of his suffering he elected to do alone, and how much of his hate he hid away.
'Arnie, who did it?' she asked, her voice breaking with grief for him. No, she had not liked the car, but to see it reduced to this made her understand fully what Arnie's commitment had been, and she could hate it no longer - or so she thought.
Arnie made no answer. He stood looking at Christine, his eyes burning, his head slightly down.
The windscreen had been smashed through in two places; handfuls of safety glass fragments were strewn across the slashed seat covers like trumpery diamonds. Half of the front bumper had been pried off and now dragged on the pavement, near a snarl of black wires like octopus tentacles. Three of the four side windows had also been broken. Holes had been punched through the sides of the body at waist-level in ragged, wavering lines. It looked as if some sharp, heavy instrument - maybe the pry-end of a tyre iron - had been used. The passenger door hung open, and she saw that all the dashboard glass had been broken. Tufts and wads of stuffing were everywhere. The speedometer needle lay on the driver's side floormat.
Arnie walked slowly around his car, noting all of this. Leigh spoke to him twice. He didn't answer either time. Now the leaden colour of his face was broken by two hectic, burning spots of flush riding high up on his cheekbones. He picked up the octopus-thing that a been lying on the pavement and she saw it was a distributor cap - her father had pointed that out to her once when he had been tinkering with their car.
He looked at it for a moment, as if examining an exotic zoological specimen, and then threw it down. Broken