From a Buick 8

  On three more occasions, things appeared in the Buick's trunk. Once it was half a dozen large green beetles which looked like no beetles anyone in Troop D had ever seen. Curt and Tony spent an afternoon at Horlicks University, looking through stacks of entomology texts, and there was nothing like those green bugs in the books, either. In fact, the very shade of green was like nothing anyone in Troop D had ever seen before, although none could have explained exactly how it was different. Carl Brundage dubbed it Headache Green. Because, he said, the bugs were the color of the migraines he sometimes got. They were dead when they showed up, the whole half-dozen. Tapping their carapaces with the barrel of a screwdriver produced the sort of noise you would have gotten by tapping a piece of metal on a block of wood.

  "Do you want to try a dissection?" Tony asked Curt.

  "Do you want to try one?" Curt replied.

  "Not particularly, no."

  Curt looked at the bugs in the trunk--most of them on their backs with their feet up--and sighed. "Neither do I. What would be the point?"

  So, instead of being pinned to a piece of corkboard and dissected while the video camera ran, the bugs were bagged, tagged with the date (the line on the tag for NAME/RANK OF OIC was left blank, of course), arid stored away downstairs in that battered green file-cabinet. Allowing the alien bugs to make their journey from the Buick's trunk to the green file-cabinet unexamined was another step down Curt's road to acceptance. Yet the old look of fascination still came into his eyes sometimes. Tony or Sandy would see him standing at the roll-up doors, peering in, and that light would be there, more often than not. Sandy came to think of it as his Kurtis the Krazy Kat look, although he never told anyone that, not even the old Sarge. The rest of them lost interest in the Buick's misbegotten stillbirths, but Trooper Wilcox never did.

  In Curtis, familiarity never bred contempt.

  On a cold February day in 1984, five months or so after the appearance of the bugs, Brian Cole stuck his head into the SC's office. Tony Schoondist was in Scranton, trying to explain why he hadn't spent his entire budget appropriation for 1983 (there was nothing like one or two scrimpy SCs to make everyone else look bad), and Sandy Dearborn was holding down the big chair. By then it was fitting his ass quite nicely.

  "Think you better take a little amble out to the back shed, boss," Brian said. "Code D."

  "What kind of Code D we talking about, Bri?"

  "Trunk's up."

  "Are you sure it didn't just pop open? There haven't been any fireworks since just before Christmas. Usually--"

  "Usually there's fireworks, I know. But the temperature's been too low in there for the last week. Besides, I can see something."

  That got Sandy on his feet. He could feel the old dread stealing its fat fingers around his heart and starting to squeeze. Another mess to clean up, maybe. Probably. Please God don't let it be another fish, he thought. Nothing that has to be hosed out of there by men wearing masks.

  "Do you think it might be alive?" Sandy asked. He thought he sounded calm enough, but he did not feel particularly calm. "The thing you saw, does it look--"

  "It looks like some sort of uprooted plant," Brian said. "Part of it's hanging down over the back bumper. Tell you what, boss, it looks a little bit like an Easter lily."

  "Have Matt call Curtis in off the road. His shift's almost over, anyway."

  Curt rogered the Code D, told Matt he was out on Sawmill Road, and said he'd be back at base in fifteen minutes. That gave Sandy time to get the coil of yellow rope out of the hutch and to have a good long look into Shed 13 with the pair of cheap but fairly powerful binoculars that were also kept in the hutch. He agreed with Brian. The thing hanging out of the trunk, a draggled and membranous white shading to dark green, looked as much like an Easter lily as anything else. The kind you see about five days after the holiday, drooping and going on dead.

  Curt showed up, parked sloppily in front of the gas pump, and came on the trot to where Sandy, Brian, Huddie, Arky Arkanian, and a few others were standing at the shed windows in those sidewalk superintendent poses. Sandy held the binoculars out and Curt took them. He stood for nearly a full minute, at first making tiny adjustments to the focus-knob, then just looking.

  "Well?" Sandy asked when he was finally finished.

  "I'm going in," Curt replied, a response that didn't surprise Sandy in the slightest; why else had he bothered to get the rope? "And if it doesn't rear up and try to bite me, I'll photograph it, video it, and bag it. Just give me five minutes to get ready."

  It didn't take him even that. He came out of the barracks wearing surgical gloves--what were already coming to be known in the PSP as "AIDS mittens"--a barber's smock, rubber galoshes, and a bathing cap over his hair. Hung around his neck was a Puff-Pak, a little plastic breathing mask with its own air supply that was good for about five minutes. In one of his gloved hands he had a Polaroid camera. There was a green plastic garbage bag tucked into his belt.

  Huddie had unlimbered the videocam and now he trained it on Curt, who looked tres fantastique as he strode manfully across the parking lot in his blue bathing cap and red galoshes (and even more so when Sandy had knotted the yellow rope around his middle).

  "You're beautiful!" Huddie cried, peering through the video camera. "Wave to your adoring fans!"

  Curtis Wilcox waved dutifully. Some of his fans would look at this tape in the days after his sudden death seventeen years later, trying not to cry even as they laughed at the foolish, amiable look of him.

  From the open dispatch window, Matt sang after him in a surprisingly strong tenor voice: "Hug me . . . you sexy thing! Kiss me . . . you sexy thing!"

  Curt took all the ribbing well, but it was secondary to him, his mates" laughter like something overheard in another room. That light was in his eyes.

  "This really isn't very bright," Sandy said as he cinched the loop of the rope snugly around Curt's waist. Not with any real hope of changing Curt's mind, however. "We should probably wait and see what develops. Make sure this is all, that there's nothing else coming through."

  "I'll be okay," Curt said. His tone was absent; he was barely listening. Most of him was inside his own head, running over a checklist of things to do.

  "Maybe," Sandy said, "and maybe we're starting to get a little careless with that thing." Not knowing if it was really true, but wanting to say it out loud, try it on for size. "We're starting to really believe that if nothing's happened to any of us so far, nothing ever will. That's how cops and lion-tamers get hurt."

  "We're fine," Curt said, and then--appearing not to sense any contradiction--he told the other men to stand back. When they had, he took the video camera from Huddie, put it on the tripod, and told Arky to open the door. Arky pushed the remote clipped to his belt and the door rattled up on its tracks.

  Curt let the Polaroid's strap slip to his elbow, so he could pick up the videocam tripod, and went into Shed B. He stood for a moment on the concrete halfway between the door and the Buick, one gloved hand touching the Puff-Pak's mask under his chin, ready to pull it up at once if the air was as foul as it had been on the day of the fish.

  "Not bad," he said. "Just a little whiff of something sweet. Maybe it really is an Easter lily."

  It wasn't. The trumpet-shaped flowers--three of them--were as pallid as the palms of a corpse, and almost translucent. Within each was a dab of dark blue stuft that looked like jelly. Hanging in the jelly were little pips. The stalks looked more like treebark than parts of a flowering plant, their green surfaces covered with a network of cracks and crenellations. There were brown spots that looked like some sort of fungoid growth, and these were spreading. The stems came together in a rooty clod of black soil. When he leaned toward this (none of them liked seeing Curt lean into the trunk that way, it was too much like watching a man stick his stupid head into a bear's mouth), Curt said he could smell that cabbagey aroma again. It was faint but unmistakable.

  "And I tell you, Sandy, there's the smell of salt, as well.
I know there is. I spent a lot of summers on Cape Cod, and you can't miss that smell."

  "I don't care if it smells like truffles and caviar," Sandy replied. "Get the hell out of there."

  Curt laughed--Silly old Gramma Dearborn!--but he pulled back. He set the video camera pointing down into the trunk from its tripod, got it running, then took some Polaroids for good measure.

  "Come on in, Sandy--check it out."

  Sandy thought it over. Bad idea, very bad idea. Stupid idea. No doubt about it. And once he had that clear in his head, Sandy handed the coil of rope to Huddie and went on in. He looked at the deflated flowers lying in the Buick's trunk (and the one hanging over the lip, the one Brian Cole had seen) and couldn't suppress a little shiver.

  "I know," Curt said, lowering his voice so the Troopers outside wouldn't hear. "Hurts just to look, doesn't it? It's the visual equivalent of hearing someone scrape a blackboard with his fingernails."

  Sandy nodded. Hole in one.

  "But what triggers that reaction?" Curt asked. "I can't put my finger on any one thing. Can you?"

  "No." Sandy licked his lips, which had gone dry. "And I think that's because it's everything together. A lot of it's the white."

  "The white. The color."

  "Yeah. Nasty. Like a toad's belly."

  "Like cobwebs spun into flowers," Curt said.

  They looked at each other for a moment, trying to smile and not doing a very good job of it. State Police poets, Trooper Frost and Trooper Sandburg. Next they'd be comparing the goddam thing to a summer's day. But you had to try doing that, because it seemed you could only grasp what you were seeing by an act of mental reflection that was like poetry.

  Other similes, less coherent, were banging and swerving in Sandy's head. White like a communion wafer in a dead woman's mouth. White like a thrush infection under your tongue. White like the foam of creation just beyond the edge of the universe, maybe.

  "This stuff comes from a place we can't even begin to comprehend," Curt said. "Our senses can't grasp any of it, not really. Talking about it's a joke--you might as well try to describe a four-sided triangle. Look there, Sandy. Do you see?" He pointed the tip of a gloved finger at a dry brown patch just below one of the corpse-lily flowers.

  "Yeah, I see it. Looks like a burn."

  "And it's getting bigger. All the spots are. And look there on the flower." It was another brown patch, spreading as they looked at it, gobbling an ever-widening hole in the flower's fragile white skin. "That's decomposition. It's not going in quite the same way as the bat and the fish, but it's going, just the same. Isn't it?"

  Sandy nodded.

  "Pull the garbage bag out of my belt and open it, would you?"

  Sandy did as he was asked. Curt reached into the trunk and grasped the plant just above its rooty bulb. When he did, a fresh whiff of that watery cabbage/spoiled cucumber stench drifted up to them. Sandy took a step back, hand pressed against his mouth, trying not to gag and gagging anyway.

  "Hold that bag open, goddammit!" Curt cried in a choked voice. To Sandy he sounded like someone who has just taken a long hit off a primo blunt and wants to hold the smoke down as long as possible. "Jesus, it feels nasty! Even through the gloves!"

  Sandy held the bag open and shook the top. "Hurry up, then!"

  Curt dropped the decaying corpse-lily plant inside, and even the sound it made going down the bag's plastic throat was somehow wrong--like a harsh whispered cry, something being pressed relentlessly between two boards and almost silently choking. None of the similes was right, yet each seemed to flash a momentary light on what was basically unknowable. Sandy Dearborn could not express even to himself how fundamentally revolting and dismaying the corpse-lilies were. Them and all the Buick's miscarried children. If you thought about them too long, the chances were good that you really would go mad.

  Curt made as if to wipe his gloved hands on his shirt, then thought better of it. He bent into the Buick's trunk instead, and rubbed them briskly on the brown trunk-mat. Then he stripped the gloves off, motioned for Sandy to open the plastic bag again, and threw them inside on top of the corpse-lily. That smell puffed out again and Sandy thought of once when his mother, eaten up by cancer and with less than a week to live, had belched in his face. His instinctive but feeble effort to block that memory before it could rise fully into his consciousness was useless.

  Please don't let me be sick, Sandy thought. Ok please, no.

  Curt checked to make sure the Polaroids he had taken were still tucked into his belt, then slammed the Buick's trunk. "Let's get out of here, Sandy. What do you say?"

  "I say that's the best idea you've had all year."

  Curt winked at him. It was the perfect wiseguy wink, spoiled only by his pallor and the sweat running down his cheeks and forehead. "Since it's only February, that's not saying much. Come on."

  Fourteen months later, in April of 1985, the Buick threw a lightquake that was brief but extremely vicious--the biggest and brightest since The Year of the Fish. The force of the event mitigated against Curt and Tony's idea that the energy flowing from or through the Roadmaster was dissipating. The brevity of the event, on the other hand, seemed to argue for the idea. In the end, it was a case of you pays your money and you takes your choice. Same as it ever was, in other words.

  Two days after the lightquake, with the temperature in Shed B standing at an even sixty degrees, the Buick's trunk flew open and a red stick came sailing up and out of it, as if driven by a jet of compressed air. Arky Arkanian was actually in the shed when this happened, putting his posthole digger back on its pegs, and it scared the hell out of him. The red stick clunked against one of the shed's overhead beams, came down on the Buick's roof with a bang, then rolled off and landed on the floor. Hello, stranger.

  The new arrival was about nine inches long, irregular, the thickness of a man's wrist, with a couple of knotholes in one end. It was Andy Colucci, looking in at it through the binoculars five or ten minutes later, who determined that the knotholes were eyes, and what looked like grooves or cracks on one side of the thing was actually a leg, perhaps drawn up in its final death-agony. Not a stick, Andy thought, but some kind of red lizard. Like the fish, the bat, and the lily, it was a goner.

  Tony Schoondist was the one to go in and collect the specimen that time, and that night at The Tap he told several Troopers he could barely bring himself to touch it. "The goddamned thing was staring at me," he said. "That's what it felt like, anyway. Dead or not." He poured himself a glass of beer and drank it down at a single draught. "I hope that's the end of it," he said. "I really, really do."

  But of course it wasn't.

  Shirley

  It's funny how little things can mark a day in your mind. That Friday in 1988 was probably the most horrible one in my life--I didn't sleep well for six months after, and I lost twenty-five pounds because for awhile I couldn't eat--but the way I mark it in time is by something nice. That was the day Herb Avery and Justin Islington brought me the bouquet of field-flowers. Just before everything went crazy, that was.

  They were in my bad books, those two. They'd ruined a brand-new linen skirt, horsing around in the kitchen. I was no part of it, just a gal minding her own business, getting a cup of coffee. Not paying attention, and isn't that mostly when they get you? Men, I mean. They'll be all right for awhile, so you relax, even get lulled into thinking they might be basically sane after all, and then they just break out. Herb and that Islington came galloping into the kitchen like a couple of horses yelling about some bet. Justin is thumping Herb all around the head and shoulders and hollering Pay up, you son of a buck, pay up! and Herb is like We were just kidding around, you know I don't bet when I play cards, let hose of me! But laughing, both of them. Like loons. Justin was half up on Herb's back, hands around his neck, pretending to choke him. Herb was trying to shake him off, neither of them looking at me or even knowing I was there, standing by the Mr. Coffee in my brand-new skirt. Just PCO Pasternak, you know--part of the
furniture.

  "Look out, you two galoots!" I yelled, but it was too late. They ran smack into me before I could put my cup down and there went the coffee, all down my front. Getting it on the blouse didn't bother me, it was just an old thing, but the skirt was brand-new. And nice. I'd spent half an hour the night before, fixing the hem.

  I gave a yell and they finally stopped pushing and thumping. Justin still had one leg around Herb's hip and his hands around his neck. Herb was looking at me with his mouth hung wide open. He was a nice enough fellow (about Islington I couldn't say one way or the other; he was transferred over to Troop K in Media before I really got to know him), but with his mouth hung open that way, Herb Avery looked as dumb as a bag of hammers.

  "Shirley, oh jeez," he said. You know, he sounded like Arky, now that I think back, same accent, just not quite as thick. "I never sar" you dere."

  "I'm not surprised," I said, "with that other one trying to ride you like you were a horse in the goddam Kentucky Derby."

  "Are you burned?" Justin asked.

  "You bet I'm burned," I said. "This skirt was thirty-five dollars at J.C. Penney and it's the first time I wore it to work and it's ruined. You want to believe I'm burned."

  "Jeepers, calm down, we're sorry," Justin said. He even had the gall to sound offended. And that's also men as I've come to know them, pardon the philosophy. If they say they're sorry, you're supposed to go all mellow, because that takes care of everything. Doesn't matter if they broke a window, blew up the powerboat, or lost the kids" college fund playing blackjack in Atlantic City. It's like Hey, I said I was sorry, do you have to make a federal case of it?