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exactly is it?" I asked. "What is it about this car?"
    He sat looking out at Libertyville Avenue without saying anything for a long time, and then he turned off the radio with a quick snap, cutting off Foreigner in mid-flight.
    "I don't know exactly," he said. "Maybe it's because for the first time since I was eleven and started getting pimples, I've seen something even uglier than I am. Is that what you want me to say? Does that let you put it in a neat little category?"
    "Hey, Arnie, come on," I said. "This is Dennis here remember me?"
    "I remember," he said. "And we're still friends, right?"
    "Sure, last time I checked. But what has that got to do with—"
    "And that means we don't have to lie to each other, or at least I think that's what it's supposed to mean. So I got to tell you, maybe it's not all jive. I know what I am. I'm ugly. I don't make friends easily. I… alienate people somehow. I don't mean to do it, but somehow I do. You know?"
    I nodded with some reluctance. As he said, we were friends, and that meant keeping the bullshit to a bare minimum.
    He nodded back, matter-of-factly. "Other people—" he said, and then added carefully, "you, for instance, Dennis don't always understand what that means. It changes how you look at the world when you're ugly and people laugh at you. It makes it hard to keep your sense of humor. It plugs up your sinuses. Sometimes it makes it a little hard to stay sane."
    "Well, I can dig that. But—"
    "No," he said quietly. "You can't dig it. You might think you can, but you can't. Not really. But you like me, Dennis—"
    "I love you, man," I said. "You know that."
    "Maybe you do," he said. "And I appreciate it. if you do you know it's because there's something else—something underneath the zits and my stupid face—"
    "Your face isn't stupid," Arnie," I said. "Queer-looking, maybe, but not " stupid."
    "Fuck you," he said, smiling.
    "And de Cayuse you rode in on, Range Rider."
    "Anyway, that car's like that. There's something underneath. Something else. Something better. I see it, that's all."
    "Do you?"
    "Yeah, Dennis," he said quietly. "I do."
    I turned onto Main Street. We were getting close to LeBay's now. And suddenly I had a truly nasty idea. Suppose Arnie's father had gotten one of his friends or students to beat his feet over to LeBay's house and buy that car out from under his son? A touch Machiavellian, you might say, but Michael Cunningham's mind was more than a little devious. His specialty was military history.
    "I saw that car—and I felt such an attraction to it… I can't explain it very well even to myself. But "
    He trailed off, those gray eyes looking dreamily ahead.
    "But I saw I could make her better," he said.
    "Fix it up, you mean?"
    "Yeah… well, no. That's too impersonal. You fix tables, chairs, stuff like that. The lawnmower when it won't start. And ordinary cars."
    Maybe he saw my eyebrows go up. He laughed, anyway—a little defensive laugh.
    "Yeah, I know how that sounds," he said. "I don't even like to say it, because I know how it sounds. But you're a friend, Dennis. And that means a minimum of bullshit. I don't think she's any ordinary car. I don't know why I think that but I do."
    I opened my mouth to say something I might later have regretted, something about trying to keep things in perspective or maybe even about avoiding obsessive behavior. But just then we swung around the corner and onto LeBay's street.
    Arnie pulled air into his lungs in a harsh, hurt gasp.
    There was a rectangle of grass on LeBay's lawn that was even yellower, balder, and uglier than the rest of his lawn. Near one end of that patch there was a diseased-looking oil-spill that had sunk into the ground and killed everything that had once grown there. That rectangular piece of ground was so fucking gross I almost believe that if you looked at it for too long you'd go blind.
    It was where the '58 Plymouth had been standing yesterday.
    The ground was still there but the Plymouth