|
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 neighbors would
never have stood for a car just moldering 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 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 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 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
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: | 
