Christine

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.”

“Mr LeBay, you said you’d hired someone to take care of your brother’s house until it was sold. Was that true?”

He shifted a little in his chair. “No, it wasn’t. I lied on impulse. I didn’t like the thought of that car back in that garage… as if it had found its way home. If there are emotions and feelings that still live on, they would be there, as well as in the car herself.” And very quickly he corrected himself: “Itself.”

Not long after, I said my goodbyes and followed my headlights home through the dark, thinking over everything LeBay had told me. I wondered if it would make any difference to Arnie if I told him one person had had a mortal accident in his car and another had actually died in it. I pretty well knew that it wouldn’t; in his own way, Arnie could be every bit as stubborn as Roland LeBay himself. The lovely little scene over the car with his parents had shown that quite conclusively. The fact that he went on taking auto-shop courses down there in the Libertyville High version of the DMZ showed the same thing.

I thought of LeBay saying, I didn’t like the thought of that car back in that garage… as if it had found its way home.

He had also said that his brother took the car someplace to work on it. And the only do-it-yourself garage in Libertyville now was Will Darnell’s. Of course, there might have been another back in the ’50s, but I didn’t believe it. In my heart what I believed was that Arnie had been working on Christine in a place where she had been worked on before.

Had been. That was the operant phrase. Because of the fight with Buddy Repperton, Arnie was afraid to leave it there any longer, So maybe that avenue to Christine’s past was blocked off as well.

And, of course, there were no curses. Even LeBay’s idea about lingering emotions was pretty farfetched. I doubted if he really believed it himself. He had shown me an old scar, and he had used the word vengeance. And that was probably a lot closer to the truth than any phony supernatural bullshit. Of course.

No; I was seventeen years old, bound for college in another year, and I didn’t believe in such things as curses and emotions that linger and grow rancid, the spilled milk of dreams. I would not have granted you the power of the past to reach out horrid dead hands toward the living.

But I’m a little older now.

13 LATER THAT EVENING

As I was motorvating over the hill I saw

Maybelline in a Coupe de Ville.

Cadillac rollin down the open road

But nothin outrun my VS Ford…

— Chuck Berry

My mother and Elaine had gone to bid, but my dad was up, watching the eleven o’clock news on TV. “Where you been, Dennis?” he asked.

“Bowling,” I said, the lie coming naturally and instinctively to my lips. I didn’t want my father to know any of this. Peculiar as it was, it really wasn’t peculiar enough to be more than moderately interesting. Or so I rationalized.

“Arnie called,” he said. “Asked me to have you call back if you got in before eleven-thirty or so.”