The Cutprice Guignol

Thank you once again for another prodigious dose of patience in between Christine recaps – uh, I wrote about Storm of the Century, if that counts for anything? No? Fair enough. Well, with that said, let’s pick up where we left off last time with the iconic novel that redefined the phrase “vehicular manslaughter”, shall we?

We jump into the next chapter, which opens with a bit of Chester Burnett:

And a trip to Darnell’s where things are, predictably, taking a turn for the worse. We left off last time with Christine’s brutal murder of Buddy Repperton, and, on that same night, Will Darnell, the owner of the garage where Arnie tended to his beloved car for some time, is considering his own mortality as his emphysema worsens. One thing that’s taken his mind off of it recently is Arnie Cunningham (who, at first, Darnell wrote off as a “goddamn queer”, which, you know, maybe he’s on to something there), who is currently out of town at a chess tournament – though, much to his surprise, his car seems to have made its own way out of the shop despite his absence.

Most of this chapter is a run-down of Christine’s near-magical fix-up job over the course of the last year or so, which Darnell considering the strange details about both the car and Arnie’s approach to getting her road-worthy: “he put stuff like that in an open file because nothing really inexplicable had happened to him. Except maybe what was happening now.”

He recounts a visit from the cops after Moochie’s death at the hands of Christine – Arnie, according to the cop, seemed like he wanted to admit something, but was “scared green” about it and kept stum. Darnell has a feeling he knows what this is, given Christine’s miraculous recovery after what Repperton and his crew did to he. “Those hoods didn’t just beat up on Cunningham’s ’58,” according to Darnell, “they killed it.” This particular turn of phrase is an interesting choice, another mark in the column of people speaking in oddly human terms about Christine despite their acknowledgement that she’s a car.

Arnie turns up at the garage, admitting his defeat at the chess tournament – the tournament that, in order to attend, he’d have been a good 300 miles away when Christine took her trip out of Darnell’s earlier that night. At first, Darnell dismisses it as imagination, thinking Arnie must have given the keys to someone else – but, later that night, Darnell wakes to find Christine driving herself back into her spot under her own steam. Terrified, he checks on the car, to find that she’s pretty much in perfect shape – well, apart from the smell of rotting turnips in the front seat, which is probably nothing to worry about, right? Darnell, a consummate businessmen, begins to figure out how he can turn this knowledge of the self-driving car to his own advantage.

Next, Chuck Berry is up to the plate:

And we return to the site of Repperton’s murder, with his car recovered several days later, and the deaths of Repperton and company attributed to a drunk driving accident. The news hits the students of Libertyville High hard, but none harder than Arnie himself – “he couldn’t quite lose the feeling that he was somehow involved”, unable to accept the official notice of a hard-drinking night turned sour.

He and Leigh are still not talking after the incident with the burger, and she wants him to sell Christine (“as if the car had grown hands and rammed that piece of hamburger down her throat, for Christ’s sake”). As Arnie takes Christine for a spin, he reflects on his recent resignation from the chess club, and his frustration at how easily the teacher took him turning in his proverbial stripes:

“…the guy hadn’t even tried to persuade him to stay, that was the thing. He should have at least tried, because Arnie was the best the LHS chess club had to offer, and Slawson knew it. If he had tried, maybe Arnie would have changed his mind…”

The slow encroachment of LeBay into Arnie’s psyche via Christine is so well-executed throughout this section of the book, and it’s little moments like this, the self-aggrandizing victimization that always puts Arnie as the aggrieved party, that sells it for me – it’s not violent or excessive or extreme, but it’s there, worming its way into his brain. At the same time, this could be read as Arnie hoping for someone to stop him from giving up on his life outside of Christine, some part of him still wanting to hang on to what came before despite the car’s gradual consumption of his entire life.

Arnie drives around and eventually loses track of time as he cruises, stopping at a pizza joint to call his home and offer explanation for his absence to his parents – but his father isn’t having it.

“Dad, are you okay? You sound funny.”

“I’m fine,” Michael said. “Just scraped your dinner down the garbage disposal, your mother’s upstairs crying again, and you’re having a pizza. Enjoying your car, Arnie?”

Arnie and his father have a confrontation over the phone, as Arnie comes close to admitting that there is something terribly wrong with the car’s influence over him – there’s a great moment here that I missed on my first readthrough, where he thinks about thumping Leigh on the back while she was choking because “there was no such thing as the Heimlich Maneuver because it hadn’t been invented yet” – true, at least, for Christine, who came to be in 1958, sixteen years before the Heimlich’s invention and wide adoption. I love the idea that her influence stretches this far, forcing the memory of a well-established move out of Arnie’s mind because this is about the knowledge she has, not him.

After Michael hangs up the phone, Arnie calls the Cabot household to talk to Leigh. After her mother tries to palm him off, implying that she is fearful that Arnie sexually assaulted her daughter, Leigh comes on to the phone, and lays out her ultimatum once more – if he won’t get rid of the car, they can’t be together.

“He closed his eyes and saw Leigh walking home from school. And a block down, idling at the kerb, was Christine. Waiting for her.

“I can’t do that,” he said.

“Then we don’t have much to talk about, do we?””

With that, Arnie is utterly alone – his family are furious with him, his girlfriend has dumped him, and all of it because of Christine. All at once, he’s overcome by a violent inner monologue –

“…his rotten shitting old man who was so fucking pussywhipped that he ought to just give that cunt he was married to a razor so she could cut it off to that cheap bitch in her fancy house with her legs crossed she had probably been having her period and that was why she choked on that goddamn hamburger….”

I love the way King strips away even the punctuation from this section to give it that raw, unbridled feeling – it’s such a break from the short sentences and controlled inner monologue that we’re used to from Arnie, it feels like a slap in the face in the most effective way possible. Even Arnie, this time, can’t deny that something is going on, and he has a vision of an undead LeBay sitting with Christine’s other victims as he signs her over to Arnie for good.

Arnie barely manages to scramble a dime into the phone again to make another call – this time, of course, to Dennis. Perhaps because Dennis has been locked away in hospital all this time and hasn’t been exposed as bluntly to Christine’s influence over Arnie, or perhaps because Arnie is looking for the kind of comfort that he can only find in a friend he has known for a lifetime, but either way, he’s in physical therapy and can’t come to the phone. This is ultimately what pushes Arnie over the edge, and he flees back to Christine, finally consumed with the memory of what happened on the night she fixed herself, and realizing that she healed her own injuries after the attack from Repperton and his cronies.

“What could be so horrible about that?

“Nothing,” a voice said.

He looked around. Roland D. LeBay was sitting on the passenger side of the car…”

LeBay has been threatening around the edges of the story for a while now, but this stark apparition of him is genuinely a bit gut-churning. He’s in something close to his prime here, dressed well and wearing the medals he earned in the military – he asks for a piece of pizza, but, when he goes to take it, Arnie realizes that he is not looking at LeBay any longer, but at an older version of himself.

“This octogenarian Arnie Cunningham croaked, as its body twisted and withered on Christine’s red seat…The voice cracked and rose and whined into a shrill, senile treble, and now the skin broke open in sores and surface tumors and behind the glasses milky cataracts covered both eyes like shades being pulled down…the smell of it was what he had smelled in Christine before, what Leigh had smelled…the high, gassy, gagging smell of high-speed decay.”

In the context of the rest of the book, I think this is a really interesting choice of horror to unleash on Arnie – so much of Christine as a novel so far (and especially the sections of Dennis’ narration) are about the horror of ageing, the slow, steady decline that these boys see themselves at the top of. The worst thing that Arnie can see – the most disturbing vision he can have – is of himself going through the natural process of ageing. It’s not necessarily just the shock of it or the grotesque way that this vision comes about, but the certainty that, at some point, he will experience these changes if he lives long enough. The chapter ends with Arnie screaming, and just like that, we’re back off to Darnell’s (via some Charley Ryan).

Arnie pulls into the garage, insisting to himself that what he saw before was nothing more than a dream – though, by his own admittance, he feels as though something has changed in him, that he had “crossed the last bridge, or something”. Certainly, his inner monologue is a lot nastier than it was before, wishing Leigh would get an “abysmal fucking from the rapist called Life” and dismissing the issues people are having with him as a proof that he is changing for the better. However, when he pulls up at Darnell’s, he finds someone there waiting for him – namely, Junkins, the cop who suspects him of involvement with the death of Repperton and company. Junkins reveals that there were other tire tracks in the snow, as well as flecks of paint that match Christine’s, to which Arnie points out he was at the chess tournament – though Darnell, overhearing, doesn’t put much stock in it.

“He knows the facts are wrong, and his intuition tells him there’s something even wronger than that…he could spend a million years, and not get all the way to the truth.”

And, though Junkins eventually lets Arnie go for the time being, it’s clear that the walls are starting to close in on Arnie – internally as much as externally, as the spirit of LeBay starts to get the better of him, and the coincidences piling up around the deaths of those who wronged him start to get too much to ignore. Which is where we’ll leave off this time, as Darnell decides to keep an eye on Christine in the hopes of making something of her apparent supernatural abilities.

You can catch up on the others right here, and I will endeavour to get another up in a slightly-less embarrassingly distant timeframe this time around. Check in again for another soon!