Christine

“All through those years, the one thing that Rollie really wanted was a brand-new car. Not a Cadillac or a Lincoln; he didn’t want to join the upper class, the officers, the shitters. He wanted a new Plymouth or maybe a Ford or a Dodge.

“Veronica wrote now and then, and she said that they spent most of their Sundays going round to car dealerships wherever Rollie was currently stationed. She and the baby would sit in the old Hornet Rollie bad 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, totalled 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 l957,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 coups, 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 humourlessly. “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 per cent 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; I 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.