visitors, a lot of flowers, a lot of cards. All of it was, in some ways, very enjoyable - like being alive to help celebrate your own wake.
But I also got a lot of pain and a lot of nights when I couldn't sleep; I got an arm suspended over my body by weights and pulleys, likewise a leg (they both seemed to itch all the time under the casts), and a temporary cast what is called a 'presser cast' - around my lower back. Also, of course, I got the prospect of a long hospital stay and endless trips in a wheelchair to that chamber of horrors so innocently labelled the Therapy Wing.
Oh and one other thing - I got a lot of time.
I read the paper; I asked questions of my visitors; and on more than a few occasions, as things went on and my suspicions began to get out of hand, I asked myself if I might not be losing my mind.
I was in the hospital until Christmas, and by the time I got home, my suspicions had almost taken their final shape. I was finding it more and more difficult to deny that monstrous shape, and I knew damned well I wasn't losing my mind. In some ways it would have been better - more comforting - if I could have believed that. By then I was badly frightened, and more than half in love with my best friend's girl, as well.
Time to think . . . too much time.
Time to call myself a hundred names for what I was thinking about Leigh. Time to took up at the ceiling of my room and wish I had never heard of Arnie Cunningham . . . or Leigh Cabot . . . or of Christine.
PART II: ARNIE - TEENAGE LOVE-SONGS Chapter 20 The Second Argument
The Dealer came up to me and said,
'Trade in your Fo'd,
And I'll put you in a car that'll
Eat up the road!
Just tell me what you want and
Sign that line,
I'll have it brought down to you
In an hour's time.'
I'm gonna get me a car
And I'll be headed on down the road;
Then I won't have to worry about
That broken-down, ragged Ford.
- Chuck Berry
Arnie Cunningham's 1958 Plymouth became street-legal on the afternoon of November 1, 1978. He finished the process, which had really begun the night he and Dennis Guilder had changed that first flat tyre, by paying an excise tax fee of $8.50, a municipal road tax of $2.00 (which also enabled him to park free at the meters in the downtown area), and a licence-plate fee of $15.00. He was issued Pennsylvania plate HY-6241-J at the Motor Vehicle Bureau in Monroeville.
He drove back from the MVB in a car Will Darnell had loaned him and rolled out of Darnell's Do-It-Yourself Garage behind the wheel of Christine. He drove her home.
His father and mother arrived together from Horlicks University an hour or so later. The fight started almost at once.
'Did you see it?'Arnie asked, speaking to them both but perhaps a little more to his father. 'I registered it just afternoon.'
He was proud; he had reason to be. Christine had just been washed and waxed, and she gleamed in the late afternoon autumn sunlight. There was still a lot of rust on her, but she looked a thousand times better than she had on the day Arnie bought her. The rocker panels, like the bonnet and the back seat, were brand new. The interior was spick and span and neat as a pin. The glass and the chrome gleamed.
'Yes, I - ' Michael began.
'Of course we saw it,' Regina snapped. She was making a drink, spinning a swizzle-stick in a Waterford glass in furious counter-clockwise circles. 'We almost ran into it. I don't want it parked here. The place looks like a used-car lot.'
'Mom!' Arnie said, stunned and hurt. He looked to Michael, but Michael had left to make a drink of his own perhaps he had decided he was going to need it.
'Well it does,' Regina Cunningham said, Her face was a trifle paler than usual; the rouge on her cheeks stood out almost like clown-colour. She knocked back half of her gin and tonic at a swallow, grimacing the way people grimace at the taste of bad medicine. 'Take it back where you had it. I don't want it here and I won't have it here, Arnie. That's final.'
'Take it back?' Arnie said, now angry as well as hurt. 'That's great, isn't it?