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 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