glass gritted under their heels. She spoke to him again. He didn't answer, and now, as well as a terrible pity for him, she began to feel afraid, too. She told Dennis Guilder later that it seemed - at least at the time - perfectly possible that he might have lost his mind.
He booted a piece of chrome trim out of his way. It struck the cyclone fence at the back of the lot with a little tinkling sound. The tail-lights had been smashed, more trumpery gems, this time rubies, this time on the pavement instead of the seat.
'Arnie - ' she tried again.
He stopped. He was looking in through the hole in the driver's side window. A terrible low sound began to come from his chest, a jungle sound. She looked over his shoulder, saw, and suddenly felt a crazy need to laugh and scream and faint all at the same time. On the dashboard . . . she hadn't noticed at first; in the midst of the general destruction she hadn't noticed what was on the dashboard. And she wondered, with vomit suddenly rising in her throat, who could be so low, so completely low, as to do such a thing, to . . .
'Shitters!' Arnie cried, and his voice was not his own. It was high and shrill and cracked with fury.
Leigh turned around and threw up, holding blindly onto the car next to Christine, seeing small white dots in front of her eyes that expanded like puffed rice. Dimly she thought of the county fair - every year they'd haul an old junk car up onto a plank platform and lean a sledgehammer against it and you got three swings for a quarter. The idea was to demolish the car. But not . . . not to . . .
'You goddam shitters!' Arnie screamed. 'I'll get you! I'll get you if it's the last thing I do! If it's the last motherfucking thing I ever do!'
Leigh threw up again and for one terrible moment found herself wishing that she had never ever met Arnie Cunningham.
PART II: ARNIE - TEENAGE LOVE-SONGS Chapter 27 ARNIE AND REGINA
Would you like to go riding
In my Buick '59?
I said, would you like to go riding
In my Buick '59?
It's got two carburettors
And a supercharger up the side.
- The Medallions
He let himself into the house that night at quarter of twelve. The clothes he had been wearing with the shopping trip to Pittsburgh in mind were grease- and sweat-stained. His hands were more deeply grimed, and a shallow cut corkscrewed across the back of the left like a brand. His face looked haggard and stunned. There were dark circles under his eyes.
His mother sat at the table, a game of solitaire laid out in front of her. She had been waiting for him to come home and dreading it deeply at the same time. Leigh had called and told her what had happened. The girl, who had impressed Regina as being quite a nice girl (if perhaps not quite good enough for her son), sounded as if she had been crying.
Regina, alarmed, had hung up as quickly as she could and had dialled Darnell's Garage. Leigh had told her Arnie had called for a tow-truck from there and bad ridden in with the driver. He had put her in a taxi, over her protests. The phone had rung twice and then a wheezy yet gravelly voice had said, 'Yuh. Darnell's.'
She had hung up, realizing it would be a mistake to talk to him there - and it looked as if she and Mike had already made enough mistakes about Arnie and his car. She would wait until he came home. Say what she had to say looking him in the face .
She said it now. 'Arnie, I'm sorry.'
It would have been better if Mike could be here, too. But he was in Kansas City, attending a symposium on trade and the beginnings of free enterprise in the Middle Ages. He wouldn't be back until Sunday, unless this brought him home early. She thought it might. She realized - not without some rue - that she might just be awakening to the full seriousness of this situation.
'Sorry,' Arnie echoed in a flat, accentless voice.
'Yes, I - that is, we - ' She couldn't go on. There was something terrible in the deadwood of his expression. His eyes were blanks. She could only look at him and shake her head, her eyes brimming, the hateful