Christine

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.