brake, only one of the tail-lights flashed. My mental automotive accountant relentlessly rang up another five dollars.
He hauled the wheel to the left and pulled out into the street. The remains of the silencer scraped rustily at the lowest point of the driveway. Arnie gave it more gas, and the car roared like a refugee from the demo derby at Philly Plains. Across the street, people leaned forward on their porches or came to their doors to see what was going on.
Bellowing and snarling, Christine rolled up the street at about ten miles an hour, sending out great stinking clouds of blue oilsmoke that hung and then slowly raftered in the mellow August evening.
At the stop sign forty yards up, it stalled. A kid rode past the hulk on his Raleigh, and his impudent, brassy shout drifted back to me: 'Put it in a trash-masher, mister!'
Arnie's closed fist popped out of the window. His middle finger went up as he flipped the kid the bird. Another first. I had never seen Arnie flip anyone the bird in my life.
The starter whined, the motor sputtered and caught. This time there was a whole rattling series of backfires. It was as if someone had just opened up with a machine-gun on Laurel Drive, Libertyville, USA. I groaned.
Someone would call the cops pretty soon, reporting a public nuisance, and they would grab Arnie for driving an unregistered, uninspected vehicle - and probably for the nuisance charge as well. That would not exactly ease the situation at home.
There was one final echoing bang - it rolled down the street like the explosion of a mortar shell - and then the Plymouth turned left on Martin Street, which brought you to Walnut about a mile up. The westering sun turned its battered red body briefly to gold as it moved out of sight. I saw that Arnie had his elbow cocked out the window.
I turned to LeBay, mad all over again, ready to give him some more hell. I tell you I felt sick inside my heart. But what I saw stopped me cold.
Roland D. LeBay was crying.
It was horrible and it was grotesque and most of all it was pitiable. When I was nine, we had a cat named Captain Beefheart, and he got hit by a UPS truck. We took him to the vet's - my mom had to drive slow because she was crying and it was hard for her to see - and I sat in the back with Captain Beef heart. He was in a box, and I kept telling him the vet would save him, it was going to be okay, but even a little nine-year-old dumbhead like me could see it was never going to be all right for Captain Beefheart again, because some of his guts were out and there was blood coming out of his asshole and there was shit in the box and on his fur and he was dying. I tried to pet him and he bit my hand, right in the sensitive webbing between the thumb and the first finger. The pain was bad; that terrible feeling of pity was worse. I had not felt anything like that since then. Not that I was complaining, you understand; I don't think people should have feelings like that often. You have a lot of feelings like that, and I guess they take you away to the funny-farm to make baskets.
LeBay was standing on his balding lawn not far from the place where that big patch of oil had defoliated everything, and he had this great big old man's snotrag out and his head was down and he was wiping his eyes with it. The tears gleamed greasily on his checks, more like sweat than real tears. His adam's apple went up and down.
I turned my head so I wouldn't have to look at him cry and happened to stare straight into his one-car garage. Before, it had seemed really full - the stuff along the walls, of course, but most of all that huge old car with its double headlights and its wraparound windscreen and its acre of hood. Now the stuff along the walls only served to accentuate the garage's essential emptiness. It gaped like a toothless mouth.
That was almost as bad as LeBay. But when I looked back, the old bastard had gotten himself under control well, mostly. He had stopped leaking at the eyes and he had stuffed the snotrag into the