for Arnie after school, thinking we'd ride home together and talk it over a little, but I was wrong about that too. He'd already left for Darnell's Garage to work on Christine.
PART I: DENNIS - TEENAGE CAR-SONG Chapter 17 CHRISTINE ON THE STREET AGAIN
I got a 1966 cherry-red Mustang Ford
She got a 380 horsepower overload,
You know she's way too powerful
To be crawling on these Interstate roads.
- Chuck Berry
I didn't get a chance to really talk to Arnie until after the football game the following Saturday. And that was also the first time since the day be had bought her that Christine was out on the street.
The team went up to Hidden Hills, about sixteen miles away, on the quietest school-activity bus ride I've ever been on. We might have been going to the guillotine instead of to a football game. Even the fact that their record, 1-2, was only slightly better than ours, didn't cheer anybody up much. Coach Puffer sat in the seat behind the bus driver, pale and silent, as if he might be suffering from a hangover.
Usually a trip to an away game was a combination caravan and circus. A second bus, loaded up with the cheerleaders, the band, and all the LHS kids who had signed up as 'rooters' ('rooters', dear God! if we hadn't all been through high school, who the hell would believe it?), trundled along behind the team bus. Behind the two buses would be a line of fifteen or twenty cars, most of them full of teenagers, most with THUMP EM TERRIERS bumper stickers - beeping, flashing their lights, all that stuff you probably remember from your own high school days.
But on this trip there was only the cheerleader/band bus (and that wasn't even full - in a winning year if you didn't sign up for the second bus by Tuesday, you were out of luck) and three or four cars behind that. The fair-weather friends had already bailed out. And I was sitting on the team bus next to Lenny Barongg, glumly wondering if I was going to get knocked out of my jock that afternoon, totally unaware that one of the few cars behind the bus today was Christine.
I saw it when we got out of the bus in the Hidden Hills High School parking lot. Their band was already out on the field, and the thud from the big drum came clearly, oddly magnified under the lowering, cloudy sky. It was going to be the first really good Saturday for football, cool, overcast, and fallish.
Seeing Christine parked beside the band bus was surprise enough, but when Arnie got out on one side and Leigh Cabot got out on the other, I was downright stunned - and more than a little jealous. She was wearing a clinging pair of brown woollen slacks and a white cableknit pullover, her blond hair spilling gorgeously over her shoulders.
'Arnie,' I said. 'Hey, man!'
'Hi, Dennis,' he said a little shyly.
I was aware that some of the players getting off the bus were also doing double-takes; here was Pizza-Face Cunningham with the gorgeous transfer from Massachusetts. How in God's name did that happen?
'How are you?'
'Good,' he said, 'Do you know Leigh Cabot?,
'From class,' I said. 'Hi, Leigh.'
'Hi, Dennis. Are you going to win today?'
I lowered my voice to a hoarse whisper. 'It's all been fixed. Bet your ass off.'
Arnie blushed a little at that, but Leigh cupped her hand to her mouth and giggled.
'We're going to try, but I don't know,' I said.
'We'll root you on to victory,' Arnie said. 'I can see it in tomorrow's paper now - Guilder Becomes Airborne, Breaks Conference TD Record.'
'Guilder Taken to Hospital with Fractured Skull, that's more likely,' I said. 'How many kids came up? Ten? Fifteen?'
'More room on the bleachers for those of us that did,' Leigh said. She took Arnie's arm - surprising and pleasing him, I think. Already I liked her. She could have been a bitch or mentally fast asleep - it seems to me that a lot of really beautiful girls are one or the other - but she was neither.
'How's the rolling iron?' I asked, and walked over to the car.
'Not too bad.' He followed me over, trying not to grin too widely.
The work had progressed, and now there was enough done on the Fury so that it didn't look quite so crazy and helter-skelter. The other half of the old, rusted front grille had been replaced, and the nest of cracks in