Well, as a matter of fact I did have a set of jumper cables in my boot, but I didn't much like LeBay guessing it. I like him guessing it because . . . I sighed a little. Because I didn't want to be involved in Arnie's future relationship with the old clunker he had bought, but I could see myself getting dragged in, step by step.
Arnie had dropped out of the conversation completely. He walked into the garage and got into the car. The evening sun was slanting strongly in now, and I saw the little puff of dust that went up when Arnie sat down and automatically brushed at the seat of my own pants. For a moment he just sat there behind the wheel, hands gripping it loosely, and I felt a return of my unease. It was, in a way, as if the car had swallowed him. I told myself to stop it, that there was no damn reason for me to be acting like a goosey seventh-grade schoolgirl.
Then Arnie bent forward a little. The engine began to turn over. I turned and shot LeBay an angry, accusatory glance, but he was studying the sky again, as if for rain.
It wasn't going to start; no way it was going to start. My Duster was in pretty good shape, but the two I'd owned before it were clunkers (modified clunkers; neither was in the same class as Christine); and I'd become very familiar with that sound on cold winter mornings, that slow and tired cranking that meant the battery was scraping the bottom of the barrel.
'Don't bother, Arnie,' I said. 'It's not going to fire up.'
He didn't even raise his head. He turned the key off and then turned it on again. The motor cranked with painful, dragging slowness.
I walked over to LeBay. 'You couldn't even leave it running long enough to build up a charge, could you?' I asked.
LeBay glanced at me from his yellowing, rheumy eyes, said nothing, and then began checking the sky for rain again.
'Or maybe it never started at all. Maybe you just got a couple of friends to come over and help you push it into the garage. If an old shit like you has any friends.'
He looked down at me. 'Son,' he said. 'You don't know everything. You ain't even dry behind the ears yet. When you've slogged your way through a couple of wars, like I have - '
I said deliberately, Fuck your couple of wars,' and walked toward the garage where Arnie was still trying to start his car, Might as well try to drink the Atlantic dry with a straw or ride a hot-air balloon to Mars, I thought.
Pretty soon the last ohm and erg would be sucked out of that old corroded Sears battery, and then there would be nothing but that most dismal of all automotive sounds, most commonly heard on rainy back roads and deserted highways: the dull, sterile click of the solenoid, followed by an awful sound like a death-rattle.
I opened the driver's side door. 'I'll get my cables,' I said.
He looked up. 'I think she'll start for me,' he said.
I felt my lips stretch in a large, unconvincing grin. 'Well, I'll get them, just in case.'
'Sure, if you want,' he said absently, and then in a voice almost too low to hear he said, 'Come on, Christine. What do you say?'
In the same instant, that voice awoke in my head and spoke again - Let's go for a ride, big guy . . . let's cruise and I shuddered.
He turned the key again. What I expected was that dull solenoid click and death-rattle. What I heard was the slow crank of the engine suddenly speeding up. The engine caught, ran briefly, then quit. Arnie turned the key again. The engine cranked over faster. There was a backfire that sounded as loud as a cherry-bomb in the closed space of the garage. I jumped. Arnie didn't. He was lost in his own world.
At this point I would have cursed it a couple of times, just to help it along: Come on, you whore is always a