west side of town. I drove over there after the funeral, but it’s gone.”
“It went broke twelve years ago,” I said. “I was just a kid, There’s a Chinese fast-food place there now.”
“They were paying off the mortgage at the rate of two payments a month. And, of course, they had no little girl to take care of any longer. But for Veronica, there was never any light or impulse toward recovery.
“She went about committing suicide quite coldbloodedly, from all that I have been able to find out. If there were textbooks for aspiring suicides, her own might be included as an example to emulate. She went down to the Western Auto store here in town—the same one where I got my first bicycle many many years ago—and bought twenty feet of rubber hose. She fitted one end over Christine’s exhaust pipe and put the other end in one of the back windows. She had never gotten a driver’s licence, but she knew how to start the car. That was really all she needed to know.”
I pursed my lips, wet them with my tongue, and heard my voice, little more than a rusty croak. “I think I’ll get that soda now.”
“Perhaps you’d be good enough to get me another,” he said. “It will keep me awake—they always do—but I suspect I’d be awake most of tonight anyway.”
I suspected I would be, too. I went to get the sodas in the motel office, and on my way back I stopped halfway across the parking lot. He was only a deeper shadow in front of his motel unit, his white socks glimmering like small ghosts. I thought, Maybe the car is cursed. Maybe that’s what it is. It sounds like a ghost story, all right. There’s a signpost up ahead… next stop, the Twilight Zone!
But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it?
Of course it was. I went on walking again Cars didn’t carry curses any more than people carried them; that was horror-movie stuff, sort of amusing for a Saturday night at the drive-in, but very, very far from the day-to-day facts that make up reality.
I gave him his can of soda and heard the rest of his story, which could be summed up in one line: He lived unhappily ever after. The one and only Roland D. LeBay had kept his small tract house, and he had kept his 1958 Plymouth. In 1965 he had hung up his night watchman’s cap and his check-in clock. And somewhere around that same time he had stopped his painstaking efforts to keep Christine looking and running like new—he had let her run down the way a man might let a watch run down.
“You mean it just sat but there?” I asked. “Since 1965? For thirteen years?”
“No, he put it in the garage, of course,” LeBay said. “The neighbours would never have stood for a car just mouldering away out on someone’s lawn. In the country, maybe, but not in Suburbia, USA.”
“But it was out there when we—”
“Yes, I know. He put it out on the lawn with a FOR SALE sign in the window. I asked about that. I was curious, and so I asked. At the Legion. Most of them had lost touch with Rollie, but one of them said he thought he’d seen the car out there on the lawn for the first time this May.”
I started to say something and then fell silent. A terrible idea had come to me, and that idea was simply this: It was too convenient. Much too convenient. Christine had sat in that dark garage for years—four, eight, a dozen, more. Then—a few months before Arnie and I came alone and Arnie saw it—Roland LeBay had suddenly hauled it out and stuck a FOR SALE sign on it.
Later on—much later—I checked back through issues of the Pittsburgh papers and the Libertyville paper, the Keystone. He had never advertised the Fury, at least not in the papers, where you usually hawk a car you want to sell. He just put it out on his suburan street—not even a thoroughfore—and waited for a buyer to come along.
I did not completely realize the rest of the thought then—not in any logical, intellectual way, at least—but I had enough of it to feel a recurrence of that cold, blue feeling of fright. It was as if he knew a buyer would be coming. If not in May, then in June. Or July. Or August. Sometime soon.
No, I didn’t get this idea logically or rationally. What came instead was a wholly visceral image: a Venus- Flytrap at the edge of a swamp, its green jaws wide open, waiting for an insect to land.
The right insect.
“I remembering thinking he must have given it up because he didn’t want to take a chance of flunking the driver’s exam,” I said finally. “After you get so old, they make you take one every year or two. The renewal s stops being automatic.”
George LeBay nodded. “That sounds like Rollie,” he said. “But…”
“But what?”
“I remember reading somewhere—and I can’t remember who said it, or wrote it, for the life of me—that there are “times” in human existence. That when it came to be steam-engine time', a dozen men invented steam engines. Maybe only one man got the patent, or the credit in the history books, but all at once there they were, all those people working on that one idea. How do you explain it? Just that it’s steam-engine time.”
LeBay took a drink of his soda and looked up at the sky.
“Comes the Civil War and all at once it’s “ironclad time'. Then it’s “machine-gun time'. Next thing you know it’s “electricity time” and “wireless time” and finally it’s atom-bomb time'. As if those ideas all come not from individuals but from some great wave of intelligence that always keeps flowing… some wave of intelligence that is outside of humanity.”
He looked at me.
“That idea scares me if I think about it too much, Dennis. There seems to be something… well, decidedly unchristian about it.”
“And for your brother there was “sell Christine time'?”
“Perhaps. Ecclesiastes says there’s a season for everything—a time to sow, a time to reap, a time for war, a time for peace, a time to put away the sling, and a time to gather stones together. A negative for every positive. So if there was “Christine time” in Rollie’s life, there might have come a time for him to put Christine away as well.
“If so, he would have known it. He was an animal, and animals listen very well to their instincts.
“Or maybe he finally just tired of it,” LeBav finished.
I nodded that that might be it, mostly because I was anxious to be gone, not because that explained it to my complete satisfaction. George LeBay hadn’t seen that car on the day Arnie had yelled at me go back. I had seen it though. The ’58 hadn’t looked like a car that had been resting peacefully in a garage. It had been dirty and dented, the windscreen cracked, one bumper mostly torn away. It had looked like a corpse that had been disinterred and left to decay in the sun.
I thought of Veronica LeBay and shivered.
As if reading my thoughts—part of them, anyway LeBay said, “I knew very little about how my brother may have lived or felt during the last years of his life, but I’m quite sure of one thing, Dennis. When he felt, in 1965 or whenever it was, that it was time to put the car away, he put it away. And when he felt it was time to put it up for sale, he put it up for sale.”
He paused.
“And I don’t think I have anything else to tell you except that I really believe your friend would be happier if he got rid of that car. I looked at him closely, your friend. He didn’t look like a particularly happy young man at the present. Am I wrong about that?”
I considered his question carefully. No, happiness wasn’t exactly Amie’s thing, and never had been. But until the thing had begun with the Plymouth, he had seemed at least content as if he had reached a modus vivendi with life. Not a completely happy one, but at least a workable one.
“No,” I said. “You’re not wrong.”
“I don’t believe my brother’s car will make him happy. If anything, just the opposite.” And as if he had just read my thoughts of a few minutes before, he went on: “I don’t believe in curses, you know. Nor in ghosts or anything precisely supernatural. But I do believe that emotions and events have a certain… lingering resonance. It may be that emotions can even communicate themselves in certain circumstances, if the circumstances are peculiar enough… the way a carton of milk will take the flavour of certain strongly spiced foods if it’s left open in the refrigerator. Or perhaps that’s only a ridiculous fancy on my part, Possibly it’s just that I would feel better knowing the car my niece choked in and my sister-in-law killed herself in had been pressed down into a cube of meaningless metal. Perhaps all I feel is a sense of outraged propriety.”
