From a Buick 8

  The New Sarge can say nothing. He's too amazed.

  "I think it may have been talking to them," Curt says.

  "Talking." He's trying to get the sense of this. "Talking to them."

  "Yes." Curt puts his hat--what they always call the big hat--back on his head and hooks the strap under his chin the way you wear it in warm weather and adjusts the brim purely by feel. Then, to his old friend he says: "Can you say it's never talked to you, Sandy?"

  The New Sarge opens his mouth to say of course it hasn't, but the other man's eyes are on him, and they are grave. In the end the SC says nothing.

  "You can't. Because it does. To you, to me, to all of us. It talked loudest to Huddie on the day that monster came through, but we hear it even when it whispers. Don't we? And it talks all the time. Even in its sleep. So it's important not to listen."

  Curt stands up.

  "Just to watch. That's our job and I know it now. If it has to breathe through that valve long enough, or that reed, or that whatever-it-is, sooner or later it'll choke. Stifle. Give out. And maybe it won't really mind. Maybe it'll more or less die in its sleep. If no one riles it up, that is. Which mostly means doing no more than staying out of snatching distance. But it also means leaving it alone."

  He starts away, his life running out from under his feet like sand and neither of them knowing, then stops and takes one more look at his old friend. They weren't quite rookies together but they grew into the job together and now it fits both of them as well as it ever will. Once, when drunk, the Old Sarge called law enforcement a case of good men doing bad chores.

  "Sandy."

  Sandy gives him a whatnow look.

  "My boy is playing Legion ball this year, did I tell you?"

  "Only about twenty times."

  "The coach has a little boy, must be about three. And one day last week when I went overtown to pick Ned up, I saw him down on one knee, playing toss with that little hoy in left field. And I fell in love with my kid all over again, Sandy. As strong as when I first held him in my arms, wrapped in a blanket. Isn't that funny?"

  Sandy doesn't think it's funny. He thinks it's maybe all the truth the world needs about men.

  "The coach had given them their uniforms and Ned had his on and he was down on one knee, tossing underhand to the little boy, and I swear he was the whitest, purest thing any summer sky ever looked down on." And then he says

  Now: Sandy

  In the shed there was a sallow flash, so pale it was almost lilac. It was followed by darkness . . . then another flash . . . then more darkness . . . darkness this time unbroken.

  "Is it done?" Huddie asked, then answered his own question: "Yeah, I think it is."

  Ned ignored this. "What?" he asked me. "What did he say then?"

  "What any man says when things are all right at home," I told him. "He said he was a lucky man."

  Steff had gone away to mind her microphone and computer screen, but the others were still here. Ned took no notice of any of them. His puffy, red-lidded eyes never left me. "Did he say anything else?"

  "Said you hit two homers against the Rocksburg Railroad the week before, and that you gave him a wave after the second one, while you were coming around third. He liked that, laughed telling me about it. He said you saw the ball better on your worst day than he ever had on his best. He also said you needed to start charging ground balls if you were serious about playing third base."

  The boy looked down and began to struggle. We looked away, all of us, to let him do it in reasonable privacy. At last he said: "He told me not to be a quitter, but that's what he did with that car. That fucking 8. He quit on it."

  I said, "He made a choice. There's a difference."

  He sat considering this, then nodded. "All right."

  Arky said: "Dis time I'm really going home." But before he went he did something I'll never forget: leaned over and put a kiss on Ned's swollen cheek. I was shocked by the tenderness of it. "G'night, lad."

  "Goodnight, Arky."

  We watched him drive away in his rattletrap pickup and then Huddie said, "I'll drive Ned home in his Chevy. Who wants to follow along and bring me back here to get my car?"

  "I will," Eddie said. "Only I'm waiting outside when you take him in. If Michelle Wilcox goes nuclear, I want to be outside the fallout zone."

  "It'll be okay," Ned told him. "I'll say I saw the can on the shelf and picked it up to see what it was and maced my stupid self."

  I liked it. It had the virtue of simplicity. It was exactly the sort of story the boy's father would have told.

  Ned sighed. "Tomorrow bright and early I'll be sitting in the optometrist's chair over in Statler Village, that's the downside."

  "Won't hurt you," Shirley said. She also kissed him, planting hers on the corner of his mouth. "Goodnight, boys. This time everyone goes and no one comes back."

  "Amen to that," Huddie said, and we watched her walk away. She was forty-five or so, but there was still plenty to look at when she put her backfield in motion. Even by moonlight. (Especially by moonlight.)

  Off she went, driving past us, a quick flick of right-back-atcha and then nothing but the taillights.

  Darkness from Shed B. No taillights there. No fireworks, either. It was over for the night and someday it would be over for good. But not yet. I could still feel the sleepy beat of it far down in my mind, a tidal whisper that could be words if you wanted them to be.

  What I'd seen.

  What I'd seen when I had the boy hugged in my arms, him blinded by the spray.

  "You want to ride along, Sandy?" Huddie asked.

  "Nah, guess not. I'll sit here awhile longer, then get on home. If there are problems with Michelle, you have her call me. Here or at the house, makes no difference."

  "There won't be any problem with Mom," Ned said.

  "What about you?" I asked. "Are there going to be any more problems with you?"

  He hesitated, then said: "I don't know."

  In some ways I thought it was the best answer he could have given. You had to give him points for honesty.

  They walked away, Huddie and Ned heading toward the Bel Aire. Eddie split apart from them, going toward his own car and pausing long enough at mine to take the Kojak light off the roof and toss it inside.

  Ned stopped at the rear bumper of his car and turned back to me. "Sandy."

  "What is it?"

  "Didn't he have any idea at all about where it came from? What it was? Who the man in the black coat was? Didn't any of you?"

  "No. We blue-skied it from time to time, but no one ever had an idea that felt like the real deal, or even close. Jackie O'Hara probably nailed it when he said the Buick was like a jigsaw piece that won't fit into the puzzle anywhere. You worry it and worry it, you turn it this way and that, try it everywhere, and one day you turn it over and see the back is red and the backs of all the pieces in your puzzle are green. Do you follow that?"

  "No," he said.

  "Well, think about it," I said, "because you're going to have to live with it."

  "How am I supposed to do that?" There was no anger in his voice. The anger had been burned away. Now all he wanted was instructions. Good.

  "You don't know where you came from or where you're going, do you?" I asked him. "But you live with it just the same. Don't rail against it too much. Don't spend more than an hour a day shaking your fists at the sky and cursing God."

  "But--"

  "There are Buicks everywhere," I said.

  Steff came out after they were gone and offered me a cup of coffee. I told her thanks, but I'd pass. I asked her if she had a cigarette. She gave me a prim look--almost shocked -and reminded me she didn't smoke. As though that was her toll-booth, one with the sign reading ALL BUICK ROADMASTERS MUST DETOUR BEYOND THIS POINT. Man, if we lived in that world. If only.

  "Are you going home?" she asked.

  "Shortly."

  She went inside. I sat by myself on the smokers" bench. There were cigarettes in my ca
r, at least half a pack in the glovebox, but getting up seemed like too much work, at least for the moment. When I did get up, I reckoned it would be best just to stay in motion. I could have a smoke on the way home, and a TV dinner when I got in--The Country Way would be closed by now, and I doubted if Cynthia Garris would be very happy to see my face in the place again soon, anyway. I'd given her a pretty good scare earlier, her fright nothing to mine when the penny finally dropped and I realized what Ned was almost certainly planning to do. And my fear then was only a shadow of the terror I'd felt as I looked into that rising purple glare with the boy hanging blind in my arms and that steady beat-beat-beat in my ears, a sound like approaching footfalls. I had been looking both down, as if into a well, and on an uptilted plane . . . as if my vision had been split by some prismatic device. It had been like looking through a periscope lined with lightning. What I saw was very vivid--I'll never forget it--arid fabulously strange. Yellow grass, brownish at the tips, covered a rocky slope that rose before me and then broke off at the edge of a drop. Green-backed beetles bustled in the grass, and off to one side there grew a clump of those waxy lilies. I hadn't been able to see the bottom of the drop, but I could see the sky. It was terrible engorged purple, packed with clouds and ripe with lightnings. A prehistoric sky. In it, circling in ragged flocks, were flying things. Birds, maybe. Or bats like the one Curt had tried to dissect. They were too far away for me to be sure. And all this happened very quickly, remember. I think there was an ocean at the foot of that drop but don't know why I think it--perhaps only because of the fish that came bursting out of the Buick's trunk that time. Or the smell of salt. Around the Roadmaster there was always that vague, teary smell of salt.

  Lying in the yellow grass close to where the bottom of my window (if that's what it was) ended was a silvery ornament on a fine chain: Brian Lippy's swastika. Years of being out in the weather had tarnished it. A little farther off was a cowboy boot, the fancy-stitched kind with the stacked heel. Much of the leather had been overgrown with a blackgray moss that looked like spiderwebs. The boot had been torn down one side, creating a ragged mouth through which I could see a yellow gleam of bone. No flesh; twenty years in the caustic air of that place would have decayed it, though I doubt the absence of flesh was due to mere decay alone. What I think is that Eddie J.'s old school pal was eaten. Probably while still alive. And screaming, if he could catch enough breath to do so.

  And two things more, near the top of my momentary window. The first was a hat, also furry with patches of that blackgray moss; it had grown all around the brim and also in the crease of the crown. It wasn't exactly what we wear now, that hat, the uniform has changed some since the nineteen-seventies, but it was a PSP Stetson, all right. The big hat. It hadn't blown away because someone or something had driven a splintery wooden stake down through it to hold it in place. As if Ennis Rafferty's killer had been afraid of the alien intruder even after the intruder's death, and had staked the most striking item of his clothing to make sure he wouldn't rise and walk the night like a hungry vampire.

  Near the hat, rusty and almost hidden by scrub grass, was his sidearm. Not the Beretta auto we carry now but the Ruger. The kind George Morgan had used. Had Ennis also used his to commit suicide? Or had he seen something coming, and died firing his weapon at it? Had it even been fired at all?

  There was no way to tell, and before I could look more closely, Arky had screamed at Steff to help him and I'd been yanked backward with Ned hanging in my arms like a big doll. I saw no more, but one question at least was answered. They'd gone there, all right, Ennis Rafferty and Brian Lippy both.

  Wherever there was.

  I got up from the bench and walked over to the shed a final time. And there it was, midnight blue and not quite right, casting a shadow just as if it were sane. Oil's fine, the man in the black coat had told Bradley Roach, and then he was gone, leaving behind this weird steel callingcard.

  At some point, during the last listless lightstorm, the trunk had shut itself again. About a dozen dead bugs lay scattered on the floor. We'd clean them up tomorrow. No sense saving them, or photographing them, or any of that; we no longer bothered. A couple of guys would burn them in the incinerator out back. I would delegate this job. Delegating jobs is also part of what sitting in the big chair is about, and you get to like it. Hand this one the shit and that one the sweets. Can they complain? No. Can they put it on their TS list and hand it to the chaplain? Yes. For all the good it does.

  "We'll outwait you," I said to the thing in the shed. "We can do that."

  It only sat there on its whitewalls, and far down in my head the pulse whispered: Maybe.

  . . . and maybe not.

  Later

  Obituaries are modest, aren't they? Yeah. Shirt always tucked in, skirt kept below the knee. Died unexpectedly. Could be anything from a heart attack while sitting on the jakes to being stabbed by a burglar in the bedroom. Cops mostly know the truth, though. You don't always want to know, especially when it's one of your own, but you do. Because most of the time we're the guys who show up first, with our reds lit and the walkie-talkies on our belts crackling out what sounds like so much gibble-gabble to the John Q's. For most folks who die unexpectedly, we're the first faces their staring open eyes can't see.

  When Tony Schoondist told us he was going to retire I remember thinking, Good, that's good, he's getting a little long in the tooth. Not to mention a little slow on the uptake. Now, in the year 2006, I'm getting ready to pull the pin myself and probably some of my younger guys are thinking the same thing: long in the tooth and slow on the draw. But mostly you know I feel the same as I ever did, full of piss and vinegar, ready to work a double shift just about any day of the week. Most days when I note the gray hair which now predominates the black or how much more forehead there is below the place where the hair starts, I think it's a mistake, a clerical error which will eventually be rectified when brought to the attention of the proper authorities. It is impossible, I think, that a man who still feels so profoundly twenty-five can look so happast fifty. Then there'll be a stretch of bad days and I'll know it's no error, just time marching on, that shuffling, rueful tread. But was there ever a moment as bad as seeing Ned behind the wheel of the Buick Roadmaster 8?

  Yes. There was one.

  Shirley was on duty when the call came in: a crackup out on SR 32, near the Humboldt Road intersection. Where the old Jenny station used to be, in other words. Shirley's face was pale as ashes when she came and stood in the open door of my office.

  "What is it?" I asked. "What the hell's wrong with you?"

  "Sandy . . . the man who called it in said the vehicle was an old Chevrolet, red and white. He says the driver's dead." She swallowed. "In pieces. That's what he said."

  That part I didn't care about, although I would later, when I had to look at it. At him. "The Chevrolet--have you got the model?"

  "I didn't ask. Sandy, I couldn't." Her eyes were full of tears. "I didn't dare. But how many old red and white Chevrolets do you think there are in Statler County?"

  I went out to the scene with Phil Candleton, praying the crashed Chevy would turn out to be a Malibu or a Biscayne, anything but a Bel Aire, vanity plate MY 57. But that's what it was.

  "Fuck," Phil said in a low and dismayed voice.

  He'd piled it into the side of the cement bridge which spans Redfern Stream less than five minutes" walk from where the Buick 8 first appeared and where Curtis was killed. The Bel Aire had seatbelts, but he hadn't been wearing one. Nor were there any skidmarks.

  "Christ almighty," Phil said. "This ain't right."

  Not right and not an accident. Although in the obituary, where shirts are kept neatly tucked in arid skirts are kept discreetly below the knee, it would only say he died unexpectedly, which was true. Lord yes.

  Lookie-loos had started showing up by then, slowing to stare at what lay facedown on the bridge's narrow walkway. I think one asshole actually took a picture. I wanted to run after him and stuff
his shitty little disposable camera down his throat.

  "Get some detour signs up," I told Phil. "You and Carl. Send the traffic around by County Road. I'll cover him up. Jesus, what a mess! Jesus! Who's gonna tell his mother?"

  Phil wouldn't look at me. We both knew who was going to tell his mother. Later that day I bit the bullet and did the worst job that comes with the big chair. Afterward I went down to The Country Way with Shirley, Huddie, Phil, and George Stankowski. I don't know about them, but I myself didn't pass go or collect two hundred dollars; old Sandy went directly to shitfaced.

  I only have two clear memories of that night. The first is of trying to explain to Shirley how weird The Country Way's jukeboxes were, how all the songs were the very ones you never thought of anymore until you saw their names again here. She didn't get it.

  My other memory is of going into the bathroom to throw up. After, while I was splashing cold water on my face, I looked at myself in one of the wavery steel mirrors. And I knew for sure that the getting-to-be-old face I saw looking back at me was no mistake. The mistake was believing that the twenty-five-year-old guy who seemed to live in my brain was real.

  I remembered Huddie shouting Sandy, grab my hand! and then the two of us, Ned and I, had spilled out on to the pavement, safe with the rest of them. Thinking of that, I began to cry.

  Died unexpectedly, that shit is all right for the County American, but cops know the truth. We clean up the messes and we always know the truth.

  Everyone not on duty went to the funeral, of course. He'd been one of us. When it was over, George Stankowski gave his mother and his two sisters a ride home and I drove back to the barracks with Shirley. I asked her if she was going to the reception--what you call a wake, I guess, if you're Irish--and she shook her head. "I hate those things."

  So we had a final cigarette out on the smokers" bench, idly watching the young Trooper who was looking in at the Buick. He stood in that same legs-apart, goddam-the-Democrats, didya-hear-the-one-about-the-traveling-salesman pose that we all assumed when we looked into Shed B. The century had changed, but everything else was more or less the same.