(how did you hurt your back that night, Arnie? after Repperton - the late Clarence 'Buddy' Repperton - and his buddies trashed her? How did you hurt your back so that now you have to wear this stinking brace all the time? How did you hurt your back?)
The answer rose and Arnie began to run, trying to beat the realization, to get to Christine before he saw the whole thing plain and went mad.
He ran for Christine, running his tangled emotions and some terrible drawing realization a foot race; he ran to her the way a hype runs for his works when the shakes and the jitters get so bad he can no longer think of anything but relief; he ran the way that the damned run to their appointed doom; he ran as a bridegroom runs to the place where his bride stands waiting.
He ran because inside Christine none of these things mattered - not his mother, father, Leigh, Dennis, or what he had done to his back that night when everyone was gone, that night after he had taken his almost totally destroyed Plymouth from the airport and back to Darnell's, and after the place was empty he had put Christine's transmission in neutral and pushed her, pushed her until she began to roll on her flat tyres, pushed her until she was out the door and he could hear the wind of November keening sharply around the wrecks and the abandonded hulks with their stellated glass and their ruptured gas tanks; he had pushed her until the sweat ran off him in rivers and his heart thudded like a runaway horse in his chest and his back cried out for mercy; he bad pushed her, his body pumping as if in some hellish consummation; he had pushed her, and inside the milometer ran slowly backward, and some fifty feet beyond the door his back began to really throb, and he kept pushing, and then his back began to scream in protest, and he kept pushing, muscling it along on the flat, slashed tyres, his hands going numb, his back screaming, screaming, screaming. And then -
He reached Christine and flung himself inside, shuddering and panting. His pizza fell on the floor. He picked it up and set it on the seat, feeling calm slowly wash through him like a soothing balm. He touched the steering wheel, let his hands slip down it, tracing its delicious curve. He took one glove off and felt in his pocket for his keys. For LeBay's keys.
He could still remember what had happened that night, but it did not seem horrible now; now, sitting behind Christine's steering wheel, it seemed rather wonderful.
It had been a miracle.
He remembered how it had suddenly become easier to push the car because the tyres were healing themselves magically, kneading themselves together without a scar and then inflating. The broken glass had begun to re-assemble from nowhere, knitting itself upward with small, scratchy, crystalline sounds, The dents began to pop back out.
He simply pushed her until she was right enough to run, and then he had driven her, cruising between the rows until the milometer ran back past what Repperton and his friends had done. And then Christine was okay.
What could be so horrible about that?
'Nothing,' a voice said.
He looked around. Roland D. LeBay was sitting on the passenger side of the car, wearing a black double-breasted suit, a white shirt, a blue tie. A row of medals hung askew on one lapel of his suit-coat - it was the outfit he had been buried in, Arnie knew that even though he had never actually seen it. Only LeBay looked younger and tougher. A man you'd not want to fool with.
'Start her up,' LeBay said. 'Get the heater going and let's motorvate.'
'Sure,' Arnie said, and turned the key. Christine pulled out, tyres crunching on the packed snow. He had pushed her that night until almost all the damage had been repaired. No, not repaired - negated. Negated was the right word for what had happened. And then he had put her back in stall twenty, leaving the rest to do himself.
'Let's have us some music,' the voice beside him said.
Arnie turned on the radio. Dion was singing' Donna the Prima Donna'.
'You going to eat that pizza, or what?' The voice seemed to be changing somehow.
'Sure,' Arnie said. 'You want apiece?'
Leering: 'I never say no to a piece of anything.' Arnie opened the pizza box with one hand