'He's played the odds good, but he's also been lucky for a long time, Dennis. Oh, maybe he hasn't really needed luck here in town - if it was just Libertyville, I guess he could go on for ever, or at least until he dropped dead of a heart attack - but the state tax boys are sand sharks and the feds are Great Whites. He's been lucky, but one of these days they're going to fall on him like the Great Wall of China.'
'Have you . . . have you heard things?'
'Not a whisper. Nor am I apt to. But I like Arnie Cunningham a great deal, and I know you've been worried about this car thing.'
'Yeah.' He's . . . he's not acting healthy about it, Dad. Everything's the car, the car, the car.'
'People who have not had a great deal tend to do that,' he said. 'Sometimes it's a car, sometimes it's a girl, sometimes it's a career or a musical instrument or an unhealthy obsession with some famous person. I went to college with a tall, ugly fellow we all called Stork. With Stork it was his model train set . . . he'd been hooked on model trains ever since the third grade, and his set was pretty damn near the eighth wonder of the world. He flunked out of Brown the second semester of his freshman year. His grades were going to hell, and what it came down to was a choice between college and his Lionels. Stork picked the trains.'
'What happened to him?'
'He killed himself in 1961,' my father said, and stood up 'My point is just that good people can sometimes get blinded, and it's not always their fault. Probably Darnell will forget all about him - he'll just be another guy tinkering around under his car on a crawlie-gator. But if Darnell tries to use him, you be his eyes, Dennis. Don't let him get pulled into the dance.'
'All right. I'll try. But there may not be that much I can do.'
'Yeah. How well I know it. Want to go up?'
'Sure.'
We went up, and' tired as I was, I lay awake a long time. It had been an eventful day. Outside, a night wind tapped a branch softly against the side of the house, and far away, downtown, I heard some kid's rod peeling rubber - it made a sound in the night like an hysterical woman's desperate laughter.
PART I: DENNIS - TEENAGE CAR-SONG Chapter 14 CHRISTINE AND DARNELL
He said he heard about a couple
living in the USA,
He said they traded in their baby
for a Chevrolet:
Let's talk about the future now,
We've put the past away . . .
- Elvis Costello
Between working on the construction project days and working on Christine nights, Arnie hadn't been seeing much of his folks. Relations there had been getting pretty strained and abrasive. The Cunningham house, which had always been pleasant and low-key in the past, was now an armed camp. It is a state of affairs a lot of people can remember from their teenage years, guess; too many, maybe. The kid is egotistical enough to think he or she is the first person in the world to discover some particular thing (usually it's a girl, but it doesn't have to be), and the parents are too scared and stupid and possessive to want to let go of the halter. Sins on both sides. Sometimes it gets painful and outrageous - no war is as dirty and bitter as a civil war. And it was particularly painful in Arnie's case because the split had come so late, and his folks had gotten much too used to having their own way. It wouldn't be unfair to say that they had blueprinted his life.
So when Michael and Regina proposed a four-day weekend at their lakeshore cottage in upstate New York before school started again, Arnie said yes even though he badly wanted those last four days to work on Christine. More and more often at work he had told me how he was going to 'show them'; he was going to turn Christine into a real street-rod and 'show them all'. He had already planned to restore the car to its original bright red and ivory after the bodywork was done.
But he went off with them, determined to yassuh and tug his forelock for the whole four days and have a good time with his folks - or a reasonable facsimile. I got over