Christine Recaps: Part Four
by thethreepennyguignol
In amongst all this Doctor Who-ing and Inside-No.-9-ing, you might think that I didn’t have time for a little good ol’ vehicular horror. But you’d be wrong! It’s time to get back to Christine – catch up on the last recap here, if you need a little reminder of where we’re at, and let’s jump right back into it. We’re kicking off with some Moon Martin as our song for the opener of this chapter!
Arnie and Dennis meet up again – Arnie’s sporting a shiner, but won’t tell Dennis where – or who – it came from. Dennis offers to take Arnie out for pizza and Pepsi, even though he knows it ruins Arnie’s skin (“like offering Hershey Bars to the circus fat lady”, Dennis muses to himself, once again being the world’s meanest person and also just an average teenager). Arnie accepts, and Dennis reflects on how much better Arnie has been looking lately – though he doesn’t consider Christine’s influence as part of the reason, it’s hard not to see that connection as a reader. Just like Arnie’s fixing up Christine, Christine is doing the same for Arnie.
As Arnie and Dennis eat, Dennis is once again struck with the looming threat of the beginning of his final year of high school, and his imminent induction to adult life – “a recurrence of that fierce nostalgia-in-advance and that sense of fright”. Truly, at this point in the story, the scariest thing Dennis had encountered isn’t Christine – it’s the thought of what’s about to hit him when he leaves school.
As they eat, Arnie reveals the truth behind his bruised eye – he encountered an old schoolmate, Repperton, at Darnell’s auto-shop. Repperton shot a few choice unpleasantries to him (“cuntface” is my personal favourite, as it’s what I hollered across my house this morning when I heard my cat threatening to piss on one of the blankets), but Arnie, used to this kind of antagonism, brushed it off – well, until Repperton accidentally smashed out one of Christine’s headlights. This provokes Arnie into a response – as Arnie tells it, he swung for Repperton and missed, leading to Repperton beating the utter fuck out of him, leaving him with a shiner and bruised ribs.
But what’s interesting about this is that Dennis later discovers Arnie wasn’t telling him the truth. While Repperton did beat him up, Arnie, according to another friend of Dennis who witnessed the fight, gave just as good as he got – punching Repperton in the throat and bloodying his nose, needing seven men to pull him off. It’s a really interesting detail that Arnie would choose not to tell Dennis about this aspect of the fight – why, it’s not entirely clear. Because he thought Dennis wouldn’t believe him? Dennis admits that he wouldn’t have believed it had it not come from the mouth of another friend. Or maybe because Arnie, on some level, knows that the fact he put up with so much abuse from his schoolmates for so long and only snapped when someone came after Christine indicates just how deep his feelings for her are, and doesn’t want to give that away to Dennis quite yet.
Dennis is worried that Repperton and his friends might come after Arnie and kill him – “honest-to-God kill him” – but Arnie’s more worried about where he’s going to keep Christine after Darnell told him to leave the auto-shop, much to Dennis’ annoyance:
“…it was always her, her, her. He was bright enough to see his growing obsession with her – it, dammit, it –but he wasn’t picking it up.”
Eventually, Arnie concedes that he needs to get some help, and we close out the chapter. The next one starts with The Beatles, who I can’t fucking get away from this week:
And look, in case I wasn’t making it clear enough, the next chapter starts with Dennis taking the still-unnamed cheerleader girlfriend to see Grease at the cinema. Stephen King is leaving us with no shadow of a doubt as to who Dennis’ most important relationship is with. And it’s not the girl he hasn’t even bothered to give a name to yet, you know?
Anyway, Dennis spends his date thinking about Arnie, because of course he does, and heads out to call Arnie from the lobby, where Arnie greets him with a flat tone. It’s here, interestingly, that we get The Cheerleader’s name, when Arnie mentions that he thought Dennis was out with Roseanne. I wonder if the reason Dennis is so reticent about lingering on Roseanne in his POV is because being involved with a woman represents a part of the adult life he’s so fearful of – in an earlier recap, he showed outright disdain for a married couple with kids, and it feels significant that his romantic relationship with a woman is so dismissed and played-down.
Dennis dismisses his date and tells Arnie that he has a plan for Christine. He suggests that Arnie take Christine back to LeBay and pay him for a spot in his garage – but Arnie isn’t keen.
“”Very funny, Dennis.” His voice was cold and hateful.
“Arnie, what-“””Arnie, what-“
He hung up.”
Dennis is confused until he has a hunch and picks up a newspaper – and discovers that Roland LeBay died on Saturday. Suddenly, no less – as Dennis notes, “the same day Buddy Repperton smashed Christine’s headlight”. Dennis makes the connection between the destruction of the headlight and LeBay’s death, and a familiar voice calls out to him – “a voice whispered, come in, big guy, let’s cruise…”
Ugh, I just love this sequence. LeBay’s death is such an odd, sinister moment in the book – when I first read it, I assumed from his introduction that he would be a major antagonist in the book, and it’s a real shock to have him drop dead off-page right here – though it’s far from the last we’ll be hearing from him.
Roseanne emerges from the cinema, where she suggests that she and Dennis go fool around at the embankment nearby – “I should have been thinking about the promise of her breast,” he thinks. “But instead I found myself thinking about Arnie”. Now, this isn’t the first time we’ve had Dennis thinking about Arnie when the promise of sexual contact with a girl is in the air, and, yeah, it’s far from a coincidence at this point. Especially when you compare how much he enjoyed his time with Arnie in the last chapter to his reaction to Roseanne – whose pet name for him, Den-Den, is only marginally better than “having your eyes put out by a hot poker”, according to Dennis. There is nobody in this book he expresses a genuine fondness for like Arnie, and it’s particularly interesting to put these two “dates” – one with Arnie, one with Roseanne – so close together. He wasn’t thinking about Roseanne while he was with Arnie at the diner, is all I’m saying.
The chapter ends as Dennis dreams of Roland LeBay’s corpse behind the wheel of Christine, and we start chapter eleven with a li’l Bruce Springsteen:
Dennis realizes that Arnie has taken some time away from their road crew job to go to LeBay’s funeral, and pleads his case to get some time off to go with him, which he’s eventually granted. Arnie, however, isn’t impressed when Dennis turns up to attend the funeral with him.
“”No,” he said, and it was more that word than anything else – the Saturdays he was no longer there, the coolness of Michael and Regina, the way he had been when I had called him from the movies – that made me realise just how much he had shut me out of his life”
Whether or not Dennis recognises it yet, a woman is coming between them – and that woman is Christine, her, just like Dennis thought of her in the chapter before last. They attend the funeral together, and Arnie cries, which surprises Dennis. They encounter LeBay’s brother there, and, when Arnie introduces himself, the mention of the car throws him off – Christine, as Lebay’s brother refers to her, brings up some bad memories. Roland, it seems, told his brother that he had sold the car in his last communication with him.
“In his note, Rollie spoke of you as a “sucker”, and said he had given you what he called “a royal screwing”.”
Arnie is unbothered by this, which irritates Dennis, and asks to use LeBay’s garage – but Roland’s brother isn’t done with his warnings.
“Sell her. If no-one will buy her whole, sell her for parts. If no one will buy her for parts, junk her. Do it quickly and completely. Do it the way you would quit a bad habit. I think you will be happier.”
Oh, I do love a good horror harbinger, and this is such a blunt, straightforward, and unsettling way to underline Christine’s imminent threat. Dennis pursues LeBay’s brother to press the issue of using LeBay’s garage, and his brother seems to clock some familiar emotion in Dennis now that Arnie has grown attached to Christine.
“The car,” I said. “The Fury. I don’t like it.”
He went on looking at me, not talking.
“I don’t think it’s been good for him. Maybe part of it’s being…I don’t know…”
“Jealous?” he asked me quietly. “Time he used to spend with you he spends with her?””
The two go on to discuss the intensity of their respective loved ones’ relationship with Christine, and it’s the first time Dennis really seems to admit how he feels about Arnie and Christine – acknowledging his own care for Arnie, his fear of seeing Arnie get hurt, but also, his own jealousy as Christine begins to suck up his best friend’s time. LeBay’s brother, George, tells Dennis to come by his motel later so they can talk, but leaves him with an eerie warning about Arnie’s love for Christine:
“Love is insectile; it is always hungry….Friendship. It eats friendship. If I were you, Dennis, I would now prepare for the worst.”
So much of the book so far has revolved around the friendship and, yes, love between Arnie and Dennis, and this warning from George is an underlining of the point that’s echoed throughout this first act – that friendship is the cost Arnie pays for loving Christine, and what’s started is only going to get worse.
And I can’t wait to see just how bad it’s going to get! That’s where I’m leaving it this recap, but I’ll be back to check in with our favourite extremely heterosexual teen friendship soon – if you’re reading along, let me know what you thought of this section in the comments below!
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(header image via The Guardian)
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