Christine Read online

  "Veronica wrote now and then, and she said that they spent most of their Sundays going around to car dealerships wherever Rollie was currently stationed. She and the baby would sit in the old Hornet Rollie had then, and Veronica would read little storybooks to Rita while Rollie walked around dusty lot after dusty lot with salesman after salesman, talking about compression and horsepower and hemi heads and gear ratios . . . I think, sometimes, of the little girl growing up to the background sound of those plastic pennants whipping in the hot wind of half a dozen Army tank-towns, and I don't know whether to laugh or cry."

  My thoughts turned back to Arnie again.

  "Was he obsessed, would you say?"

  "Yes. I would say he was obsessed. He began to give Veronica money to put away. Other than his failure to get promoted past Master Sergeant at any point in his career, my brother had a problem with drink. He wasn't an alcoholic, but he went on periodic binges every six or eight months. What money he had would be gone when the binge was over. He was never sure where he spent it.

  "Veronica was supposed to put a stop to that. It was one of the things he married her for. When the binges started, Rollie would come to her for the money. He threatened her with a knife once; held it to her throat. I got this from my sister, who sometimes talked to Veronica on the telephone. Veronica would not give him the money, which at that time, in 1955, totaled about eight hundred dollars. 'Remember the car, honey,' she told him, with the point of his knife on her throat. 'You'll never get that new car if'n you booze the money away.'"

  "She must have loved him," I said.

  "Well, maybe she did. But please don't make the romantic assumption that her love changed Rollie in any way. Water can wear away stone, but only over hundreds of years. People are mortal."

  He seemed to debate saying something else along that line and then to decide against it. The lapse struck me as peculiar.

  "But he never put a mark on either of them," he said. "And you must remember that he was drunk on the occasion when he held the knife to her throat. There is a great outcry about drugs in the schools now, and I don't oppose that outcry because I think it's obscene to think of children fifteen and sixteen years old reeling around full of dope, but I still believe alcohol is the most vulgar, dangerous drug ever invented--and it is legal.

  "When my brother finally left the Army in 1957, Veronica had put away a little over twelve hundred dollars. Adding to it was a substantial disability pension for his back injury--he fought the shitters for it and won, he said.

  "So the money was finally there. They got the house you and your friend visited, but before the house was even considered, of course, the car came. The car was always paramount. The visits to the car dealerships reached a fever pitch. And at last he settled upon Christine. I got a long letter about her. She was a 1958 Fury sport coupe, and he gave me all the facts and figures in his letter. I don't remember them, but I bet your friend could cite her vital statistics chapter and verse."

  "Her measurements," I said.

  LeBay smiled humorlessly. "Her measurements, yes. I do remember that he wrote her sticker price was just a tad under $3000, but he 'jewed em down,' as he put it, to $2100 with the trade-in. He ordered her, paid ten percent down, and when she came, he paid the balance in cash--ten-and twenty-dollar bills.

  "The next year, Rita, who was then six, choked to death."

  I jumped in my chair and almost knocked it over. His soft, teacherish voice had a lulling quality, and I was tired^t had been half-asleep. That last had been like a dash of cold water in my face.

  "Yes, that's right," he said to my questioning, startled glance. "They had been out 'motorvating' for the day. That was what replaced the car-hunting expeditions. 'Motorvating.' That was his word for it. He got that from one of those rock and roll songs he was always listening to. Every Sunday the three of them would go out 'motorvating.' There were litterbags in the front and the back. The little girl was forbidden to drop anything on the floor. She was forbidden to make any messes. She knew that lesson well. She . . ."

  He fell into that peculiar, thinking silence again and then came back on a new tack.

  "Rollie kept the ashtrays clean. Always. He was a heavy smoker, but he'd poke his cigarette out the wing window instead of tapping it into the ashtray, and when he was done with a cigarette, he'd snuff it and toss it out the window. If he had someone with him who did use the ashtray, he'd dump the ashtray and then wipe it out with a paper towel when the drive was over. He washed her twice a week and Simonized her twice a year. He serviced her himself, buying time at a local garage."

  I wondered if it had been Darnell's.

  "On that particular Sunday, they stopped at a roadside stand for hamburgers on the way home--there were no McDonald's in those days, you know, just roadside stands. And what happened was . . . simple enough, I suppose . . ."

  That silence again, as if he wondered just how much he should tell me, or how to separate what he knew from his speculations.

  "She choked to death on a piece of meat," he said finally. "When she started to gag and put her hands to her throat, Rollie pulled over, dragged her out of the car, and thudded her on the back, trying to bring it up. Of course now they have a method--the Heimlich Maneuver--that works rather well in situations like that. A young girl, a student teacher, actually, saved a boy who was choking in the cafeteria at my school just last year by employing the Heimlich Maneuver. But in those days . . .

  "My niece died by the side of the road. I imagine it was a filthy, frightening way to die."

  His voice had resumed that sleepy schoolroom cadence, but I no longer felt sleepy. Not at all.

  "He tried to save her. I believe that. And I try to believe that it was only ill luck that she died. He had been in a ruthless business for a long time, and I don't believe he loved his daughter very deeply, if at all. But sometimes, in mortal matters, a lack of love can be a saving grace. Sometimes ruthlessness is what is required."

  "But not this time," I said.

  "In the end he turned her over and held her by her ankles. He punched her in the belly, hoping to make her vomit. I believe he would have tried to do a tracheotomy on her with his pocket-knife if he had even the slightest idea of how to go about it. But of course he did not. She died.

  "Marcia and her husband and family came to the funeral. So did I. It was our last family reunion. I remember thinking, He will have traded the car, of course. In an odd way, I was a little disappointed. It had figured so largely in Veronica's letters and the few which Rollie wrote that I felt it was almost a member of their family. But he hadn't. They pulled up to the Libertyville Methodist Church in it, and it was polished . . . and shining . . . and hateful. It was hateful." He turned to look at me. "Do you believe that, Dennis?"

  I had to swallow before I could answer. "Yes," I said. "I believe it."

  LeBay nodded grimly. "Veronica was sitting in the passenger seat like a wax dummy. Whatever she had been--whatever there was inside her--was gone. Rollie had had the car, she had had the daughter. She didn't just grieve. She died."

  I sat there and tried to imagine it--tried to imagine what I would have done if it had been me. My daughter starts to choke and strangle in the back seat of my car and then dies by the side of the road. Would I trade the car away? Why? It wasn't the car that killed her; it was whatever she strangled on, the bit of hamburger and bun that had blocked her windpipe. So why trade the car? Other than the small fact that I wouldn't even be able to look at it, wouldn't even be able to think of it, without horror and sorrow. Would I trade it? Man, does a bear shit in the woods?

  "Did you ask him about it?"

  "I asked him, all right. Marcia was with me. It was after the service. Veronica's brother had come up from Glory, West Virginia, and he took her back to the house after the graveside ceremony--she was in a kind of walking swoon, anyway.

  "We got him alone, Marcia and I. That was the real reunion. I asked him if he intended to trade the car. It was parked direct
ly behind the hearse that had brought his daughter to the cemetery--the same cemetery where Rollie himself was buried today, you know. It was red and white--Chrysler never offered the 1958 Plymouth Fury in those colors; Rollie had gotten it custom-painted. We were standing about fifty feet away from it, and I had the strangest feeling . . . the strangest urge . . . to move yet farther away, as if it could hear us."

  "What did you say?"

  "I asked him if he was going to trade the car. That hard, mulish look came onto his face, that look I remember so well from my early childhood. It was the look that had been on his face when he threw me onto the picket fence. The look that was on his face when he kept calling my father a tosspot, even after my father made his nose bleed. He said, 'I'd be crazy to trade her, George, she's only a year old and she's only got 11,000 miles on her. You know you never get your money out of a trade until a car's three years old.'

  "I said, 'If this is a matter of money to you, Rollie, someone stole what was left of your heart and replaced it with a piece of stone. Do you want your wife looking at it every day? Riding in it? Good God, man!'

  "That look never changed. Not until he looked at the car, sitting there in the sunlight . . . sitting there behind the hearse. That was the only time his face softened. I remember wondering if he'd ever looked at Rita that way. I don't suppose he ever did. I don't think it was in him."

  He fell silent for a moment and then went on.

  "Marcia told him all the same things. She was always afraid of Rollie, but that day she was more mad than afraid--she had gotten Veronica's letters, remember, and she knew how much Veronica loved her little girl. She told him that when someone dies, you burn the mattress they slept on, you give their clothes to the Salvation Army, whatever, you put finish to the life any way you can so that the living can get on with their business. She told him that his wife was never going to be able to get on with her business as long as the car where her daughter died was still in the garage.

  "Rollie asked her in that ugly, sarcastic way he had if she wanted him to douse his car with gasoline and touch a match to her just because his daughter had choked to death. My sister started to cry and told him she thought that was a fine idea. Finally I took her by the arm and led her away. There was no talking to Rollie, then or ever. The car was his, and he could talk on and on about keeping a car three years before you trade it, he could talk about mileage until he was blue in the face, but the simple fact was, he was going to keep her because he wanted to keep her.

  "Marcia and her family went back to Denver on a Greyhound, and so far as I know, she never saw Rollie again or even wrote him a note. She didn't come to Veronica's funeral."

  His wife. First the kid, and then the wife. I knew, somehow, that it had been just like that. Bang-bang. A kind of numbness crept up my legs to the pit of my stomach.

  "She died six months later. In January of 1959."

  "But nothing to do with the car," I said. "Nothing to do with the car, right?"

  "It had everything to do with the car," he said softly.

  I don't want to hear it, I thought. But of course I would hear it. Because my friend owned that car now, and because it had become something that had grown out of all proportion to what it should have been in his life.

  "After Rita died, Veronica went into a depression. She simply never came out of it. She had made some friends in Libertyville, and they tried to help her . . . help her find her way again, I guess one would say. But she was not able to find her way. Not at all.

  "Otherwise, things were fine. For the first time in my brother's life, there was plenty of money. He had his Army pension, his disability pension, and he had gotten a job as a night watchman at the tire factory over on the 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 cold-bloodedly, 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 license, 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 out there?" I asked. "Since 1965? For thirteen years?"

  "No, he put it in the garage, of course," LeBay said. "The neighbors would never have stood for a car just mouldering away out on someone's lawn. In the country, maybe, but not in Suburbia, U.S.A."

  "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 along 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 suburban street--not even a thoroughfare--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 remember 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 rene
wal 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," LeBay 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 to 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 windshield cracked, one bumper mostly torn away. It had looked like a corpse that had been disinterred and left to decay in the sun.