From a Buick 8

  "What issue?" Ned asked.

  "Discretion," Huddie said. "Cops can keep secrets, but Curt and Tony didn't believe scientists could. "Look how fast those idiots cropdusted the atomic bomb all around the world," I heard Tony say once. "We fried the Rosenbergs for it, but anyone with half a brain knows the Russians would have had the bomb in two years, anyway. Why? Because scientists like to chat. That thing we've got out in Shed B may not be the equivalent of the A-bomb, but then again it might. One thing's for sure, it isn't anybody's A-bomb as long as it's sitting out back under a piece of canvas.""

  I thought Huddie was helping the kid understand, but I knew it was just part of the truth, not the whole truth. I've wondered from time to time if Tony and Ned's father ever really needed to talk about it--I mean on some late weekday evening when things at the barracks were at their slowest, guys cooping upstairs, other guys watching a movie on the VCR and eating microwave popcorn, just the two of them downstairs from all that, in Tony's office with the door shut. I'm not talking about maybe or kinda or sorta. I mean whether or not they ever spoke the flat-out truth: There's not anything like this anywhere, and we're keeping it. I don't think so. Because really, all they would have needed to do was to look into each other's eyes. To see that same eagerness--the desire to touch it and pry into it. Hell, just to walk around it. It was a secret thing, a mystery, a marvel. But I didn't know if the boy could accept that. I knew he wasn't just missing his father; he was angry at him for dying. In that mood, he might have seen what they did as stealing, and that wasn't truth, either. At least not the whole truth.

  "By then we knew about the lightquakes," I said. "Tony called them "dispersal events". He thought the Buick was getting rid of something, discharging it like static electricity. Issues of discretion and caretaking aside, by the end of the seventies people in Pennsylvania--and not just us but everyone--had one very big reason not to trust the scientists and the techies."

  "Three-Mile," Ned said.

  "Yes. Plus, there's more to that car than self-healing scratches and dust-repellent. Quite a bit more."

  I stopped. It seemed too hard too much.

  "Go on, tell him," Arky said. He sounded almost angry, a pissed-off bandleader in the gloaming. "You told him all dis dat don't mean shit, now you tell im da rest." He looked at Huddie, then Shirley. "Even 1988. Yeah, even dat part." He paused, sighed, looked at Shed B. "Too late to stop now, Sarge."

  I got up and started across the parking lot. Behind me, I heard Phil say: "No, hunh-unh. Let him go, kid, he'll be back."

  That's one thing about sitting in the big chair; people can say that and almost always be right. Barring strokes, heart attacks, and drunk drivers, I guess. Barring acts of what we mortals hope is God. People who sit in the big chair--who have worked to get there and work to stay there--never just say oh fuck it and go fishing. No. Us big-chair folks continue making the beds, washing the dishes, and baling the hay, doing it the best we can. Ah, man, what would we do without you? people say. The answer is that most of them would go on doing whatever the hell they want, same as always. Going to hell in the same old handbasket.

  I stood at the roll-up door of Shed B, looking through one of the windows at the thermometer. It was down to fifty-two. Still not bad--not terrible, anyway--but cold enough for me to think the Buick was going to give another shake or two before settling down for the night. No sense spreading the tarp back over it yet, then; we'd likely just have to do it again later on.

  It's winding down: that was the received wisdom concerning the Roadmaster, the gospel according to Schoondist and Wilcox. Slowing like an unwound clock, wobbling like an exhausted top, beeping like a smoke detector that can no longer tell what's hot. Pick your favorite metaphor from the bargain bin. And maybe it was true. Then again, maybe it wasn't. We knew nothing about it, not really. Telling ourselves we did was just a strategy we used so we could continue living next door to it without too many bad dreams.

  I walked back to the bench, lighting another cigarette, and sat down between Shirley and Ned. I said, "Do you want to hear about the first time we saw what we saw tonight?"

  "Yes, sir. I sure do."

  The eagerness I saw on his face made it a little easier to go on.

  Then

  Sandy was there when it started, the only one who was. In later years he would say--half-joking--that it was his one claim to fame. The others arrived on the scene soon enough, but to begin with it was only Sander Freemont Dearborn, standing by the gas-pump with his mouth hung open and his eyes squinched shut, sure that in another few seconds the whole bunch of them, not to mention the Amish and few non-Amish farmers in the area, would be so much radioactive dust in the wind.

  It happened a couple of weeks after the Buick came into Troop D's possession, around the first of August in the year 1979. By then the newspaper coverage of Ennis Rafferty's disappearance was dying down. Most of the stories about the missing State Trooper appeared in the Statler County American, but the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a feature piece on the front page of its Sunday edition at the end of July. MISSING TROOPER'S SISTER LEFT WITH MANY QUESTIONS, the headline read, and beneath that: EDITH HYAMS CALLS FOR FULL INVESTIGATION.

  Overall, the story played out exactly as Tony Schoondist had hoped it would. Edith believed the men in Troop D knew more than they were telling about her brother's disappearance; she was quoted on that in both papers. What was left between the lines was that the poor woman was half out of her mind with grief (not to mention anger), and looking for someone to blame for what might have been her own fault. None of the Troopers said anything about her sharp tongue and nearly constant fault-finding, but Ennis and Edith had neighbors who weren't so discreet. The reporters from both papers also mentioned that, accusations or no, the men in Ennis's Troop were going ahead with plans to provide the woman with some modest financial support.

  The harsh black-and-white photo of Edith in the Post-Gazette didn't help her case; it made her look like Lizzie Borden about fifteen minutes before she grabbed her hatchet.

  The first lightquake happened at dusk. Sandy had come off patrol around six that evening in order to have a little chat with Mike Sanders, the County Attorney. They had a particularly nasty hit-and-run trial coming up, Sandy the prime witness for the prosecution, the victim a child who had been left a quadriplegic. Mike wanted to be very sure that the coke-snorting Mr. Businessman responsible went away. Five years was his goal, but ten wasn't out of the question. Tony Schoondist sat in on part of the meeting, which took place in a corner of the upstairs common room, then went down to his office while Mike and Sandy finished up. When the meeting was over, Sandy decided to top up the tank in his cruiser before hitting the road for another three hours or so.

  As he walked past dispatch toward the back door, he heard Matt Babicki say in a low, just-talking-to-myself voice: "Oh you fucking thing." This was followed by a whack. "Why don't you behave?"

  Sandy peeped around the corner and asked if Matt was having that delicate time of the month.

  Matt wasn't amused. "Listen to this," he said, and boosted the gain on his radio. The SQUELCH knob, Sandy saw, was already turned as far as it would go toward +.

  Brian Cole checked in from Unit 7, Herb Avery from 5 out on the Sawmill Road, George Stankowski from God knew where. That one was almost entirely lost in a windy burst of static.

  "If this gets any worse, I don't know how I'm going to keep track of the guys, let alone shoot them any information," Matt complained. He slapped the side of his radio again, as if for emphasis. "And what if someone calls in with a complaint? Is it getting ready to thunderstorm outside, Sandy?"

  "It "was clear as a bell when I came in," he said, then looked out the window. "Clear as a bell now, too . . . as you could see, if your neck had a swivel in it. I was born with one, see?" Sandy turned his head from side to side.

  "Very funny. Haven't you got an innocent man to frame, or something?"

  "Good one, Matt. That's a very snappy comebac
k."

  As he went on his way, Sandy heard someone upstairs wanting to know if the damned TV antenna had fallen down, because the picture had all of a sudden gone to hell during a pretty good Star Trek rerun, the one about the Tribbles.

  Sandy went out. It was a hot, hazy evening with thunder rumbling off in the distance but no wind and a clear sky overhead. The light was starting to drain away into the west, and a groundmist was rising from the grass; it had gotten to a height of maybe five feet.

  He got in his cruiser (D-14 that shift, the one with the busted headrest), drove it across to the Amoco pump, got out, unscrewed the gas cap under the pull-down license plate, then stopped. He had suddenly become aware of how quiet it was--no crickets chirring in the grass, no birds singing anywhere around. The only noise was a low, steady humming, like the sound one hears if one is standing right under the county powerlines, or near an electrical substation.

  Sandy started to turn around, and as he did, the whole world went purple-white. His first thought was that, clear sky overhead or no, he had been struck by lightning. Then he saw Shed B lit up like . . .

  But there was no way to finish the metaphor. There was nothing like it, not in his experience.

  If he had been looking at those first few flashes dead on, he guessed he would have been blinded--maybe temporarily, maybe for good. Luckily for him, the shed's front roll-up door faced away from the gas-pump. Yet still the glare was enough to dazzle his eyes, and to turn that summer twilight as bright as noonday. And it made Shed B, a solid enough wooden structure, seem as insubstantial as a tent made out of gauze. Light shot through every crack and unoccupied nail-hole; it flashed out from beneath the eaves through a small cavity that might have been gnawed by a squirrel; it blazed at ground-level, where a board had fallen off, in a great brilliant bar. There was a ventilator stack on the roof, and it shot the glare skyward in irregular bursts, like smoke-signals made out of pure violet light. The flashes through the rows of windows on the roll-up doors, front and back, turned the rising groundmist into an eerie electric vapor.

  Sandy was calm. Startled, but calm. He thought: This is it, motherfucker's blowing, we're all dead. The thought of running or jumping into his cruiser never entered his head. Run where? Drive where? It was a joke.

  What he wanted was crazy: to get closer. It drew him. He wasn't terrified of it, as Mister D had been; he felt the fascination but not the fear. Crazy or not, he wanted to get closer. Could almost hear it calling him closer.

  Feeling like a man in a dream (it crossed his mind that dreaming was a serious possibility), he walked back to the driver's side of D-14, leaned in through the open window, and plucked his sunglasses off the dashboard. He put them on and started walking toward the shed. It was a little better with the sunglasses, but not much. He walked with his hand raised in front of him and his eyes narrowed down to stringent slits. The world boomed silent light all around and throbbed with purple fire. Sandy could see his shadow jumping out from his feet, disappearing, and then jumping out again. He could see the light leaping from the windows in the roll-up door and glaring off the back of the barracks. He could see Troopers starting to spill out, pushing aside Matt Babicki from dispatch, who had been closest and who got outside first. In the flashes from the shed, everyone moved herky-jerky, like actors in a silent film. Those who had sunglasses in their pockets reached to put them on. Some of those who didn't turned and stumbled back in to get them. One Trooper even drew his gun, looked down at it as if to say What the fuck'm I gonna do with this? and put it back in his holster. Two of the Troopers without sunglasses groped gamely on toward the shed nevertheless, heads down and eyes shut and hands held out before them like the hands of sleepwalkers, drawn as Sandy had been toward the stuttery flashes and that low, maddening hum. Like bugs to a buglight.

  Then Tony Schoondist ran through them, slapping them, shoving them, telling them to get the hell back, to return to the barracks and that was an order. He was trying to get his own sunglasses on and kept missing his face with them. He got them where they belonged only after poking one bow into his mouth and the other into his left eyebrow.

  Sandy saw and heard none of that. What he heard was the hum. What he saw were the flashes, turning the groundmist smoke into electric dragons. What he saw was the column of stuttery purple light rising from the conical roof-vent, stabbing up into the darkening air like a lance.

  Tony grabbed him, shook him. Another silent gunshell of light went off in the shed, turning the lenses of Tony's sunglasses into small blue fireballs. He was shouting, although there was no need to; Sandy could hear him perfectly. There was the humming sound, and someone murmuring Good God almighty, and that was all.

  "Sandy! Were you here when this started?"

  "Yes!" He found himself shouting back in spite of himself. The situation somehow demanded that they shout. The light flared and glared, mute lightning. Each time it went off, the rear side of the barracks seemed to jump forward like something that was alive, the shadows of the troopers running up its board back.

  "What started it? What set it off?"

  "I don't know!"

  "Get inside! Call Curtis! Tell him what's happening! Tell him to get his ass over here now!"

  Sandy resisted the urge to tell his SC that he wanted to stay and see what happened next. In a very elementary way the idea was stupid to begin with: you couldn't actually see anything. It was too bright. Even with sunglasses it was too bright. Besides, he knew an order when he heard it.

  He went inside, stumbling over the steps (it was impossible to judge depth or distance in those brilliant stutterflashes) and shuffled his way to dispatch, waving his arms in front of him. In his swimming, dazzled eyesight, the barracks was nothing but overlaid shadows. The only visual reality for him at that moment were the great purple flashes floating in front of him.

  Matt Babicki's radio was an endless blare of static with a few voices sticking out of it like the feet or fingers of buried men. Sandy picked up the regular telephone beside the dedicated 911 line, thinking that would be out, too--sure it would--but it was fine. He dialed Curt's number from the list tacked to the bulletin board. Even the telephone seemed to jump with fright each time one of those purple-white flashes lit the room.

  Michelle answered the phone and said Curt was out back, mowing the grass before it got dark. She didn't want to call him in, that was clear in her voice. But when Sandy asked her a second time, she said, "All right, just a minute, don't you guys ever give it a rest?"

  The wait seemed interminable to Sandy. The thing in Shed B kept flashing like some crazy neon apocalypse, and the room seemed to waver into a slightly different perspective every time it did. Sandy found it nearly impossible to believe something generating such brilliance could be anything but destructive, yet he was still alive and breathing. He touched his cheeks with the hand not holding the telephone, checking for burns or swelling. There was neither.

  For the time being, at least, he told himself. He kept waiting for the cops outside to begin screaming as the thing in the old garage exploded or melted or let something out--something unimaginable with burning electric eyes. Such ideas were a million miles from the usual run of cop-thoughts, but Sandy Dearborn had never felt less like a cop and more like a scared little boy. At last Curt picked up the telephone, sounding both curious and out of breath.

  "You have to come right now," Sandy told him. "Sarge says so."

  Curt knew what it was about immediately. "What's it doing, Sandy?"

  "Shooting off fireworks. Flashes and sparks. You can't even look at Shed B."

  "Is the building on fire?" "

  "Don't think so, but there's no way to tell for sure. You can't see inside. It's too bright. Get over here."

  The phone at Curt's end crashed down without another word spoken and Sandy went back outside. If they were going to be nuked, he decided, he wanted to be with his friends when it happened.

  Curt came roaring up the driveway marked TROOPERS ONLY ten
minutes later, behind the wheel of his lovingly restored Bel Aire, the one his son would inherit twenty-two years later. When he came around the corner he was still moving fast, and Sandy had one horrible moment when he thought Curtis was going to clean out about five guys with his bumper. But Curt was quick on the brake (he still had a kid's reflexes), and brought the Chevy to a nose-dipping hair.

  He got out of his car, remembering to turn off the engine but not the headlights, tripping over his own eager feet and almost sprawling on the macadam. He caught, his balance and went running toward the shed. Sandy had just time to see what was dangling from one hand: a pair of welders" goggles on an elastic strap. Sandy had seen excited men in his time--sure, plenty, almost every guy you stopped for speeding was excited in one way or another--but he had never seen anyone as burning with it as Curt was then. His eyes seemed to be bulging right out of his face, and his hair appeared to be standing on end . . . although that might have been an illusion caused by how fast he was running.

  Tony reached out and grabbed him on the way by, almost spilling him again. Sandy saw Curt's free hand close into a fist and start to rise. Then it relaxed. Sandy didn't know how close the rookie have come to striking his sergeant and didn't want to know. What mattered was that he recognized Tony (and Tony's authority over him) and stood down.

  Tony reached for the goggles.

  Curt shook his head.

  Tony said something to him.

  Curt replied, shaking his head vehemently.

  In the still-bright flashes, Sandy saw Tony Schoondist undergo his own brief struggle, wanting to simply order Curt to hand the goggles over. Instead, he swung around and looked at his gathered Troopers. In his haste and excitement, the SC had given them what could have been construed as two orders: to get back and to return to the barracks. Most had chosen to obey the first and ignore the second. Tony took a deep breath, let it out, then spoke to Dicky-Duck Eliot, who listened, nodded, and went back into the barracks.