all wrong, it was all crazy. He had replaced the radio aerial when the exhaust was practically dragging on the ground. He had replaced one half of the grille but not the other. He had talked to me about doing a front-end job, but inside he had replaced the ripped and dusty back seat cover with a bright red new one. The front seat cover was still a dusty wreck with a spring peeking through the passenger side.
I didn't like it at all. It was crazy and it wasn't like Arnie.
Something came to me, a trace of memory, and without even thinking about it, I stood back and looked at the entire car - not just one thing here and one thing there, but everything. And I had it; it clicked into place, and the chill came back.
That night when we had brought it here. The flat tyre. The replacement. I had looked at that new tyre on that old car and thought it was as if a little bit of the old car had been scratched away and that the new car - fresh, resplendent, just off the assembly line in a year when Ike had been President and Batista had still been in charge of Cuba - was peeking through.
What I was seeing now was like that . . . only instead of just a single new tyre, there were all sorts of things - the aerial, a wink of new chrome from the grille, one taillight that was a bright deep red, that new seat cover in the back.
In its turn, that brought back something else from childhood. Arnie and I had gone to Vacation Bible School together for two weeks each summer, and every day the teacher would tell a Bible story and leave it unfinished. Then she would give each kid a blank sheet of 'magic paper'. And if you scraped the edge of a coin or the side of your pencil over it, a picture would gradually emerge out of the white - the dove bringing the olive branch back to Noah, the walls of Jericho tumbling down, good miracle stuff like that. It used to fascinate both of us, seeing the pictures gradually emerge. At first just lines floating in the void . . . and then the lines would connect with other lines they would take on coherence . . . take on meaning . . .
I looked at Arnie's Christine with growing horror, trying to shake the feeling that in her I was seeing something terribly similar to those magic miracle pictures.
I wanted to look under the hood.
Suddenly it seemed very important that I look under the hood.
I went around to the front (I didn't like to stand in front of it - no good reason why not, I just didn't) and fumbled around for the hood release. I couldn't get it. Then I realised that it was probably inside.
I started to go around, and then I saw something else, something that scared me shitless. I could have been wrong about the hoss-kick, I suppose. I knew I wasn't, but at least technically . . .
But this was something else entirely.
The web of cracks in the windscreen was smaller.
I was positive it was smaller.
My mind raced back to that day a month ago when I had wandered into LeBay's garage to look at the car while Arnie went into the house with the old man to do the deal. The entire left side of the windscreen had been a spider's web of cracks radiating out from one central, zigzagging fault that had probably been caused by a flying stone.
Now the spider's web seemed smaller, simpler - you could see into the car from that side, and you hadn't been able to before, I was sure of that (just a trick of the light, that's all, my mind whispered).
Yet I had to be wrong - because it was impossible. Simply impossible. You could replace a windscreen; that was no problem if you had the money. But to make a webbing of cracks shrink -
I laughed a little. It was a shaky sound, and one of the guys working on the camper cap looked up at me curiously and said something to his buddy. It was a shaky sound, but maybe better than no sound at all. Of course it was the light, and nothing more. I had seen the car for the first time with the westering sun shining fully on the