Part 3: Chapter 49
It is Friday, 19 January 1979. After getting the keys to Darnell’s Garage off of Jimmy Sykes, Dennis drives to school to wait for Arnie. This is the prelude to the end game that Dennis knows is coming.
Slouched down in his car, Dennis lets Arnie walk past him in the parking lot so that he can get between his friend and the car — the drug — that has destroyed him. Springing out from his hiding place, Dennis tries to push through LeBay’s facade to reach Arnie. He taunts the ghost of the older man until, finally, Arnie’s face changes and LeBay appears.
Dennis tells LeBay that he and Leigh know the truth, and that a whole lot of other people are beginning to put two and two together, as well. LeBay lashes out at Dennis, knocking him to the ground. Arnie, horrified at what he has done, comes back to himself and begs Dennis to help him. He tells Dennis that LeBay is always with him… except when Christine rolls on her own. At those moments, Arnie is finally left alone, and LeBay joins Christine.
Dennis challenges LeBay to one last duel at Darnell’s Garage. Winner take all…
Didn’t I tell you this chapter was good’un? I love a good confrontation scene before the big showdown, when the hero finally gets the nerve to stand up to the blackhat and say, “No more.”
Dennis mentions that LeBay, in death as in life, is “extraordinarily good at getting through to people, at finding their soft spots” (454). It must be said, however, that Dennis is equally good at finding the chink in LeBay’s armor, that one place through which Arnie can still be reached:
“‘How’s your cunt, Dennis?’ [LeBay] asked…I took two shuffling steps forward on my crutches while he stood there, smiling with the corners of his mouth down.‘How did you like it when Repperton called you Cuntface?’ I asked him. ‘Did you like it so well you want to turn it around and use it on somebody else?’Part of him seemed to flinch at that — something that was maybe only in his eyes — but the contemptuous, watchful smile remained on his lips…‘Or what about in fifth grade, when Tommy Deckinger used to call you Fart-Breath?” I asked, my voice rising… ‘Did you like that? And do you remember when Ladd Smythe was a patrol-boy and he pushed you down in the street and I pulled his hat off and stuffed it down his pants? Where you been, Arnie? This guy LeBay is a Johnny-come-lately. Me, I was here all along.’” (454)
The memories of the bullying that Arnie endured and the one friend that stood next to him throughout it begins to chip away at LeBay’s defenses. We know Arnie is in there, somewhere.
But so, too, is LeBay. Dennis keeps poking and prodding until the ghost of the old man is forced to come to the fore, and we get a moment of body horror worthy of a David Cronenberg film:
“And he did [come out]… but in Arnie’s face this time, and that was more terrible that all the skulls and skeletons and comicbook horrors ever thought of. Arnie’s face changed. A sneer bloomed on his lips like a rancid rose. And I saw him as he must have been back when the world was young and a car was all a young man needed to have; everything else would just automatically follow. I saw George LeBay’s big brother” (455)
Later, when Dennis uses their shared memories of the ant farms they kept together, Arnie and LeBay begin fighting and the battlefield is Arnie’s face:
“And suddenly the calm hardness broke. His face — his face roiled. I don’t know how else to describe it. LeBay was there, furious at having to put down a kind of internal mutiny. Then Arnie was there — drawn, tired, ashamed, but most of all, desperately unhappy.” (456)
It is moments like these that bring back the memory of another desperately unhappy addict who is being pulled in two directions at once: The Shining’s Jack Torrance. Towards the end of that novel, Jack chases his son, Danny, through the hotel, threatening to kill the boy with a roque mallet. Cornered, Danny reaches through the Outlook Hotel’s ghosts to touch his father’s heart one last time. Jack comes to himself, briefly, telling Danny to run away. The ghosts take over, forcing Jack to smash his own face — as well as his identity, and his humanity — with the mallet.
Whereas Jack Torrance was an alcoholic (and the hotel used his addiction against him), Arnie’s addiction is for Christine. We’ve seen plenty of moments where he runs back to her open arms like a alcoholic does to the bottle. In this chapter, Arnie is desperate to get back to Christine, but Dennis blocks his way. This is a kind of intervention, in a way.
Dennis tells LeBay that more and more people are beginning to suspect the truth behind the murders that have been happening in Libertyville. LeBay tries to laugh it off, telling Dennis, “And where will that get you? The asylum over at Reed City?” (457).
There is no Reed City near Pittsburgh, but there was an asylum nearby in the late-1970s. When I was kid, if we thought a friend was crazy, we would tell them that the men in white coats were coming to take them away to Dixmont.
Built in 1862 in Emsworth, Pennsylvania, (just down the road from where I went to high school), Dixmont State Hospital was once a state-of-the-art institution for caring for the mentally ill. From its beginning, it was completely self-sustaining. It had its own farmlands, livestock, rail station, and post office. Also part of the facility was a water treatment plant, a sewage treatment plant, and electricity generating facilities. They had their own butchers, bakers, farmhands, electricians, laborers, pipe fitters, botanists, chefs, and even a barber and a dentist. The hospital’s campus sprawled over 407 acres. It’s main building was called Reed Hall, so perhaps that is where King came up with the name of Reed City.
A decline in funding for state hospitals and changing philosophies in psychiatric care caused the hospital to finally close in 1984. The campus was abandoned for two decades. Reed Hall burned in a fire in 1995, and the rest of the site was demolished in 2006.
For a time, Walmart was preparing the site for redevelopment, but excavation destabilized the hillside and landslides covered Pennsylvania Route 65 and the Pittsburgh Line railroad tracks on the Ohio River side, shutting them both down for weeks. Kilbuck Township residents feared another collapse, and Walmart decided not to build on the property. As of 2007, the land was left to return to nature.
One wonders what… or who… caused that landslide…
I like that Dennis assures LeBay that he can’t keep getting away with using Arnie as a stalking horse because people in the 1970s are more credulous than they were in LeBay’s time:
“‘Oh, we won’t be taken seriously at first,’ I said. ‘I give you that. But that stuff about how they put you in the loonybin as soon as you start talking about ghosts and demons… uh-uh, LeBay. Maybe in your day, before flying saucers and The Exorcist and that house in Amityville. These days a hell of a lot of people believe in that stuff… It’s going to happen… People are only rational on the surface. They still toss salt over their left shoulder if they spill the shaker, they don’t walk under ladders, they believe in survival after death.’” (457-8)
That hits LeBay right where he lives. Who knew you could scare a ghost just by watching In Search Of… and picking up a Time-Life series of books?
Whoa! I was having such a good time today that I darn near drove past the motel. While I do a U-turn up at the light, lemme mention one last reference that Dennis makes.
When he first gets out of the car to confront Arnie/LeBay, Dennis says that he feels “a little bit like Fred MacMurray in that old picture Double Indemnity” (453).
Who now?
Born in 1908, Frederick Martin MacMurray was a film actor and TV star with a career that spanned nearly fifty years. He played in mostly light, comic roles until he starred in Billy Wilder’s 1944 adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel Double Indemnity. In that classic film noir, MacMurray plays insurance man Walter Neff who plans the murder of a Mr. Dietrichson with the man’s wife, Phyllis, played exquisitely by Barbara Stanwyck. The set-up to the murder (and what Dennis is referencing) is that Neff, while pretending to be an injured Dietrichson, hobbles around on crutches on board a train. Neff leaps from the back of the slow moving locomotive, and he and Phyllis throw the dead body of her husband on the tracks.
From 1959 to 1973, MacMurray also appeared in numerous Disney films, including The Shaggy Dog, The Absent-Minded Professor, Follow Me, Boys!, and The Happiest Millionaire. At this time he also starred in the television series My Three Sons.
Can you believe we only have three chapters remaining in Christine? Actually… it’s only two chapters and an Epilogue, if ya wanna get all pedantic about it… and you know I do. Tomorrow is gonna be another quickie. Part 3: Chapter 50 is only around six pages long. We finally learn what Dennis plans to use to combat LeBay and Christine, and I must say that it looks like he’s gonna go hog-wild on the two of them for what they did to his friend. No shit!
In the meantime, since you don’t have a lot of official reading to do, maybe it’s time for you to bone up on other supernatural goings-on. I’ve brought my copies of Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown along for the ride. Just in case Dennis fails in his bid to defeat Christine, I think we should be prepared for anything. After all…
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