From a Buick 8

  "You think I'm teasing you, Ned, but I'm not. Honest. What I'm doing is trying to make you understand. The Buick was not the only thing happening around here, okay? Not. In fact, there were times when we forgot it entirely. Most of us, anyway. For long stretches of time it was easy to forget. For long stretches of time all it did was sit out back and be quiet. Cops came and went while it did. Dockerty stayed just long enough to get nicknamed Chef Prudhomme. Young Paul Loving, the one who sprained his knee last Labor Day, got transferred out and then got transferred back in three years later. This job isn't the revolving door that some jobs are, but the door turns, all right. There's probably been seventy Troopers through here since the summer of 1979--"

  "Oh, that's way low," Huddie said. "Make it a hundred, counting the transfers and the Troops who are on duty here currently. Plus a few bad eggs."

  "Yeah, a few bad eggs, but most of us did our jobs. And Ned, listen--your father and Tony Schoondist learned a lesson the night your father opened up that bat-thing. I did, too. Sometimes there's nothing to learn, or no way to learn it, or no reason to even try. I saw a movie once where this fellow explained why he lit a candle in church even though he "wasn't a very good Catholic anymore. "You don't fuck around with the infinite," he said. Maybe that was the lesson we learned.

  "Every now and then there was another lightquake in Shed B. Sometimes just a little temblor, sometimes a great-gosh-a'mighty. But people have a really amazing capacity to get used to stuff, even stuff they don't understand. A comet shows up in the sky and half the world goes around bawling about the Last Days arid the Four Horsemen, but let the comet stay there six months and no one even notices. It's a big ho-hum. Same thing happened at the end of the twentieth century, remember? Everyone ran around screaming that the sky was falling and all the computers were going to freeze up; a week goes by and it's business as usual. What I'm doing is trying to keep things in perspective for you. To--"

  "Tell me about the fish," he said, and I felt that anger again. He wasn't going to hear all I had to say, no matter how much I wanted him to or how hard I tried. He'd hear the parts he wanted to hear and call it good. Think of it as the Teenage Disease. And the light in his eyes was like the light in his father's when Curt bent over the bat-thing with his scalpel in his gloved hand. (Cutting now. I sometimes still hear Curtis Wilcox saying that in my dreams.) Not exactly like it, though. Because the boy wasn't just curious. He was angry, as well. Pissed like a bear.

  My own anger rose out of his refusal to take everything I wanted to give, for having the gall to pick and choose. But where did his come from? What was its center? That his mother had been lied to, not just once but over and over as the years passed?

  That he himself had been lied to, if only by omission? Was he mad at his father for holding on to a secret? Mad at us? Us? Surely he didn't believe the Buick had killed his father, why would he? Bradley Roach was safely on the hook for that, Roach had unspooled him up the side of a pulled-over sixteen-wheeler, leaving a bloodsmear ten feet long and as tall as a State Trooper, about six-feet-two in the case of Curtis Wilcox, pulling his clothes not just off but inside out as well in the scream of brakes and all the while the radio playing WPND, which billed itself Western Pennsylvania's Country-Fried Radio, what else would it be but country with a half-drunk low rider like Bradley? Daddy sang bass and Momma sang tenor as the coins were ripped out of Curt Wilcox's pants and his penis was torn off like a weed and his balls were reduced to strawberry jelly and his comb and wallet landed on the yellow line; Bradley Roach responsible for all that, or maybe you wanted to save some blame for Dicky's Convenience in Statler that sold him the beer, or maybe for the beer company itself with its goodtime ads about cute talking frogs and funny ballpark beer-men instead of dead people lying by the highway with their guts hanging out, or maybe you want to blame it on Bradley's DNA, little twists of cellular rope that had been whispering Drink more, drink more ever since Bradley's first sip (because some people are just wired up that way, which is to say like suitcase bombs ready to explode, which is absolutely zero comfort to the dead and wounded). Or maybe God was to blame, God's always a popular whipping boy because He doesn't talk back and never writes a column for the Op-Ed page. Not the Buick, though. Right? He couldn't find the Buick in Curt's death no matter how he traced it out. The Buick had been sitting miles away in Shed B, fat and luxy and blameless on whitewall tires that wouldn't take dirt or even the slightest pebble in the treads but repudiated them each and every one, right down to (as far as we could tell) the finest grain of sand. It was just sitting there and minding its business when Trooper Wilcox bled out on the side of Pennsylvania State Road 32. And if it was sitting in the faintest baleful reek of cabbage, what of that? Did this boy think--

  "Ned, it didn't reach out for him, if that's what you're thinking," I said. "It doesn't do that." I had to laugh at myself a little, sounding so sure. Sounding as if I knew that for a fact. Or anything else for a fact, when it came to the Roadmaster. "It has pull, maybe even a kind of voice, when it's in one of its . . . I don't know . . ."

  "Active phases," Shirley suggested.

  "Yes. When it's in one of its active phases. You can hear the hum, and sometimes you can hear it in your head, as well . . . kind of calling . . . but could it reach all the way out to Highway 32 by the old Jenny station? No way."

  Shirley was looking at me as if I'd gone slightly loopy, and I felt slightly loopy. What, exactly, was I doing? Trying to talk myself out of being angry at this unlucky, father-lost boy?

  "Sandy? I just want to hear about the fish."

  I looked at Huddie, then Phil and Eddie. All three offered variations of the same rueful shrug. Kids! it said. What are you gonna do?

  Finish it. That was what I was going to do. Set aside my anger and finish it. I had spilled the beans (I hadn't known how many beans there were in the bag when I started, I'll grant you that much), and now I was going to clean them up.

  "All right, Ned. I'll tell you what you want to hear. But will you at least bear in mind that this place stayed a barracks? Will you try to remember that, whether you believe it or not, whether you like it or not, the Buick eventually became just another part of our day, like writing reports or testifying in court or cleaning puke off the floormats of a cruiser or Steve Devoe's Polish jokes? Because it's important."

  "Sure. Tell me about the fish."

  I leaned back against the wall and raised my eyes to the moon. I wanted to give him his life back if I could. Or stars in a paper cup. All that poetry. All he wanted to hear about was the goddamned fish.

  So fuck it, I told him.

  Then

  No paper trail: that was Tony Schoondist's decree, and it was followed. People still knew how matters pertaining to the Buick were to be handled, though, what the proper channels were. It wasn't tough. No paperwork, since paper seemed always to find its way to Scranton. One either reported to Curt, the Sarge, or to Sandy Dearborn. They were the Buick guys. Sandy supposed he'd become part of that triumvirate simply by virtue of having been present at the infamous autopsy. Certainly it wasn't because he had any especial curiosity about the thing.

  Tony's no-paper edict notwithstanding, Sandy was quite sure that Curt kept his own records--notes and speculations--about the Buick. If so, he was discreet about it. Meanwhile, the temperature drops and the energy discharges--the lightquakes--seemed to be slowing down. The life was draining out of the thing.

  Or so they all hoped.

  Sandy kept no notes and could never have provided a reliable sequence of events. The videotapes made over the years would have helped do that (if it ever needed doing), but there would still be gaps and questions. Not every lightquake was taped, and so what if they had been? They were all pretty much the same. There were probably a dozen between 1979 and 1983. Most were small. A couple were as big as the first one, and one was even bigger. That big one--the all-time champ--came in 1983. Those who were there sometimes still called "83 The Year of the Fish, as if they
were Chinese.

  Curtis made a number of experiments between "79 and "83, leaving various plants and animals in and around the Buick when the temperature dropped, but all the results were essentially reruns of what happened with Jimmy and Roslyn. Which is to say sometimes things disappeared, and sometimes they didn't. There was no way of predicting in advance; it all seemed as random as a coin-toss.

  During one temperature drop, Curt left a guinea pig by the Roadmaster's left front tire. Put it in a plastic bucket. Twenty-four hours after the purple fireworks were over and the temperature in the shed had gone back to normal, the guinea pig was still in his bucket, hopping and reasonably happy. Before another lightshow, Curt put a cage with two frogs in it directly under the Buick. There were still two frogs in the cage after the lightshow ended. A day later, however, there was only one frog in the cage.

  A day after that, the cage was empty.

  Then there was the Famous Trunk Experiment of 1982. That one was Tony's idea. He and Curt put six cockroaches in a clear plastic box, then put the box in the Buick's trunk. This was directly after one of the fireworks shows had ended, and it was still cold enough in the Buick so that they could see vapor coming out of their mouths when they bent into the trunk. Three days went by, with one of them checking the trunk every day (always with a rope tied around the waist of the one doing the checking, and everyone wondering what good a damn rope would do against something that had been able to snatch Jimmy out of his gerbil-condo without opening either of the hatches . . . or the frogs out of their latched cage, for that matter). The roaches were fine the first day, and the second, and the third. Curt and Tony went out on the fourth day to retrieve them, another failed experiment, back to the old drawing board. Only the roaches were gone, or so it seemed when they first opened the trunk.

  "No, wait!" Curt yelled. "There they are! I see em! Running around like mad bastards!"

  "How many?" Tony called back. He was standing outside the door on the side of the shed, holding the end of the rope. "Are they all there? How'd they get out of the damn box, Guru's?"

  Curtis counted only four instead of six, but that didn't mean much. Cockroaches don't need a bewitched automobile to help them disappear; they are quite good at that on their own, as anybody who's ever chased one with a slipper knows. As for how they'd gotten out of the plastic box, that much was obvious. It was still latched shut, but now there was a small round hole in one side of it. The hole was three-quarters of an inch across. To Curt and the Sarge, it looked like a large-caliber bullet-hole. There were no cracks radiating out from around it, which might also indicate that something had punched through at an extremely high velocity. Or perhaps burned through. No answers. Only mirages. Same as it ever was. And then the fish came, in June of 1983.

  It had been at least two and a halt years since Troop D had kept a day-in-and-out watch on the Buick, because by late 1979 or early 1980 they had decided that, with reasonable precautions, there wasn't much to worry about. A loaded gun is dangerous, no argument, but you don't have to post an around-the-clock guard on one to make sure it won't shoot by itself. If you put it up on a high shelf and keep the kiddies away, that's usually enough to do the trick.

  Tony bought a vehicle tarp so anyone who came out back and happened to look in the shed wouldn't see the car and ask questions (in "81 a fellow from the motor-pool, a Buick-fancier, had offered to buy it). The video camera stayed out in the hutch, mounted on its tripod and with a plastic bag pulled over it to keep it free of moisture, and the chair was still there (plus a good high stack of magazines beneath it), but Arky began to use the place more and more as a gardening shed. Bags of peat and fertilizer, pallets of sod, and flower-planters first began to crowd the Buick-watching stuff and then to crowd it out. The only time the hutch reverted to its original purpose was just before, during, and after one of the lightquakes.

  June in The Year of the Fish was one of the most beautiful early summer months in Sandy's memory--the grass lush, the birds all in tune, the air filled with a kind of delicate heat, like a teenage couple's first real kiss. Tony Schoondist was on vacation, visiting his daughter on the west coast (she was the one whose baby had caused all that trouble). The Sarge and his wife were trying to mend a few fences before they got broken down entirely. Probably not a bad plan. Sandy Dearborn and Huddie Royer were in charge while he was gone, but Curtis Wilcox--no longer a rookie--was boss of the Buick, no doubt about that. And one day in that marvelous June, Buck Flanders came to see him in that capacity.

  "Temp's down in Shed B," he said.

  Curtis raised his eyebrows. "Not exactly the first time, is it?"

  "No," Buck admitted, "but I've never seen it go down so fast. Ten degrees since this morning."

  That got Curt out to the shed in a hurry, with the old excited light in his eyes. When he put his face to one of the windows in the roll-up front door, the first thing he noticed was the tarp Tony had bought. It was crumpled along the driver's side of the Buick like a scuffed-up rug. It wasn't the first time for that, either; it was as if the Buick sometimes trembled (or shrugged) and slid the nylon cover off like a lady shrugging off an evening wrap by lifting her shoulders. The needle on the round thermometer stood at 61.

  "It's seventy-four out here," Buck said. He was standing at Curt's elbow. "I checked the thermometer over by the bird-feeder before coming in to see you."

  "So it's actually gone down thirteen degrees, not ten."

  "Well, it was sixty-four in there when I came to get you. That's how fast it's going down. Like a . . . a cold front setting in, or something. Want me to get Huddie?"

  "Let's not bother him. Make up a watch-roster. Get Matt Babicki to help you. Mark it . . . um, "Car Wash Detail", Let's get two guys watching the Buick the rest of the day, and tonight as well. Unless Huddie says no or the temp bounces back up."

  "Okay," Buck said. "Do you want to be on the first stand?"

  Curt did, and quite badly--he sensed something was going to happen--but lie shook his head. "Can't. I have court, then there's that truck-trap over in Cambria." Tony would have screamed and clutched his head if he had heard Curt call the weigh-in on Highway 9 a truck-trap, but essentially that was what it was. Because someone was moving heroin and cocaine from New Jersey over that way, and the thinking was that it was moving in some of the independent truckers" loads. "Truth is, I'm busier'n a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Damn!"

  He struck his thigh with his fist, then cupped his hands to the sides of his face and peered in through the glass again. There was nothing to see but the Roadmaster, sitting in two bars of sunlight that crisscrossed on the long dark blue hood like the contending beams of spotlights.

  "Get Randy Santerre. And didn't I see Chris Soder mooning around?"

  "Yeah. He's technically off duty, but his wife's two sisters are still visiting from over Ohio and he came here to watch TV." Buck lowered his voice. "Don't want to tell you your business, Curt, but I think both those guys are jagoffs."

  "They'll do for this. They'll have to. Tell them I want regular reports, too. Standard Code D. And I'll call in by landline before I leave court."

  Curt took a final, almost anguished look at the Buick, then started back to the barracks, where he would shave and get ready for the witness stand. In the afternoon he'd be poking in the backs of trucks along with some boys from Troop G, looking for coke and hoping nobody decided to unlimber an automatic weapon. He would have found someone to swap with if there had been time, but there wasn't.

  Soder and Santerre got Buick-watching duty instead, and they didn't mind. Jagoffs never do. They stood beside the hutch, smoking, shooting the shit, taking the occasional look in at the Buick (Santerre too young to know what to expect, and he never lasted long in the PSP, anyway), telling jokes and enjoying the day. It was a June day so simple and so simply beautiful that even a jagoff couldn't help but enjoy it. At some point Buck Flanders spelled Randy Santerre; a little later on, Orville Garrett spelled Chris Soder. Huddie
came out for the occasional peek. At three o'clock, when Sandy came in to drop his ass in the SC's chair, Curtis Wilcox finally got back and spelled Buck out by Shed B. Far from rebounding, the shed's temperature had rolled off another ten degrees by then, and off-duty Troopers began to clog the lot out back with their personal vehicles. Word had spread. Code D.

  Around four P.M., Matt Babicki stuck his head into the SC's office and told Sandy he was losing the radio. "Bad static, boss. Worst ever."

  "Shit." Sandy closed his eyes, rubbed his knuckles against them, and wished for Tony. This was his first time as acting Sergeant Commanding, and while the temporary bump in his paycheck at the end of the month would no doubt be satisfying, this aggravation was not. "Trouble with that goddam car. Just what I wanted."

  "Don't take it to heart," Matt said. "It'll shoot off a few sparks and then everything'll go back to normal. Including the radio. Isn't that the way it usually goes?"

  Yes, that was the way it usually went. Sandy was not, in truth, especially worried about the Buick. But what if someone out on patrol found trouble while communications were FUBAR? Someone who had to call in a 33--Help me quick--or a 47--Send an ambulance--or, worst of all, a 10-99: Officer down. Sandy had well over a dozen guys out there, and at that moment it felt as if every one of them was riding him piggyback.

  "Listen to me, Matt. Get in my ride--it's Unit 17--and take it down to the bottom of the hill. You should be clear of interference there. Call every D currently running the roads and tell them base dispatch is temporarily 17. Code D."

  "Aw, Sandy, Jesus! Isn't that a little--"

  "I don't have time to listen to your imitation of Siskel and Ebert at the Movies just now," Sandy said. He had never felt more impatient with Police Communications Officer Babicki's whiny brand of foot-dragging bullshit than he did then. "Just do it."

  "But I won't be here to see--"

  "No, probably you won't." Sandy's voice rising a little now. "That's one you'll absolutely have to put on your TS list before you send it to the chaplain."