From a Buick 8

  "Aw, never mind! Just get him out!" Curt shouted. Until then he had kept hold of himself very well, but it had been a long and stressful day for him and he was finally nearing the breaking point.

  "It's not his fault," Huddie said, and before he could say more, Mister Dillon raised his snout and howled again . . . only to Sandy it sounded more like a scream than a howl. The dog took another crippled lurch forward, pulling Huddie's arm out straight like a flag in a high wind. He was inside now, howling and whining, lurching to get forward and pissing everywhere like a pup. Pissing in terror.

  "I know it's not!" Curt said. "You were right to begin with, I'll give you a written apology if you want, just get him the fuck out!"

  Huddie tried to reel Mister D back in, but he was a big dog, about ninety pounds, and he didn't want to come. Curt had to lay on with him in order to get D going in the right direction. In the end they dragged him out on his side, D fighting and howling and gnashing the air with his teeth the whole way. It was like pulling a sack of polecats, Sandy would say later.

  When the dog was at last clear of the door, Curtis slammed it shut. The second he did, Mister Dillon relaxed and stopped fighting. It was as if a switch in his head had been flipped. He continued to lie on his side for a minute or two, getting his breath, then popped to his feet. He gave the Troopers a bewildered look that seemed to say, "What happened, boys? I was going along good, and then I kind of blanked out."

  "Holy . . . fucking . . . shit," Huddie said in a low voice.

  "Take him back to the barracks," Curt said. "I was wrong to ask you to let him inside there, but I'm awful worried about Ennis."

  Huddie took the dog back to the barracks, Mister D once again as cool as a strawberry milkshake, just pausing to sniff at the shoes of the Troopers who had helped search the perimeter. These had been joined by others who had heard Mister D freaking out and had come to see what all the fuss was.

  "Go on in, guys," Sandy said, then added what they always said to the lookie-loos who gathered at accident sites: "Show's over."

  They went in. Curt and Sandy watched them, standing there by the closed shed door. After awhile Huddie came back without Mister D. Sandy watched Curt reach for the doorknob of the shed door and felt a sense of dread and tension rise in his head like a wave. It was the first time he felt that way about Shed B, but not the last. In the twenty-odd years that followed that day, he would go inside Shed B dozens of times, but never without the rise of that dark mental wave, never without the intuition of almost-glimpsed horrors, of abominations in the corner of the eye.

  Not that all of the horrors went unglimpsed. In the end they glimpsed plenty.

  The three of them walked in, their shoes gritting on the dirty cement. Sandy flipped on the light-switches by the door and in the glare of the naked bulbs the Buick stood like one prop left on a bare stage, or the single piece of art in a gallery that had been dressed like a garage for the showing. What would you call such a thing? Sandy wondered. From a Buick 8 was what occurred to him, probably because there was a Bob Dylan song with a similar title. The chorus was in his head as they stood there, seeming to illuminate that feeling of dread: And if I fall down dyin, y'know she bound to put a blanket on my bed.

  It sat there with its Buick headlights staring and its Buick grille sneering. It sat there on its fat and luxy whitewalls, and inside was a dashboard full of frozen fake controls and a wheel almost big enough to steer a privateer. Inside was something that made the barracks dog simultaneously howl in terror and yank forward as if in the grip of some ecstatic magnetism. If it had been cold in there before, it no longer was; Sandy could see sweat shining on the faces of the other two men and feel it on his own.

  It was Huddie who finally said it out loud, and Sandy was glad. He felt it, but never could have put that feeling into words; it was too outrageous.

  "Fucking thing ate im," Huddie said with flat certainty. T don't know how that could be, but I think he came in here by himself to take another look and it just . . . somehow . . . ate im."

  Curt said, "It's watching us. Do you feel it?"

  Sandy looked at the glassy headlight eyes. At the down-turned, sneering mouth full of chrome teeth. The decorative swoops up the sides, which could almost have been sleek locks of slick hair. He felt something, all right. Perhaps it was nothing but childish awe of the unknown, the terror kids feel when standing in front of houses their hearts tell them are haunted. Or perhaps it was really what Curt said. Perhaps it was watching them. Gauging the distance.

  They looked at it, hardly breathing. It sat there, as it would sit for all the years to come, while Presidents came and went, while records were replaced by CDs, while the stock market went up and a space shuttle exploded, while movie-stars lived and died and Troopers came and went in the Troop D barracks. It sat there real as rocks and roses. And to some degree they all felt what Mister Dillon had felt: the draw of it. In the months that followed, the sight of cops standing there side by side in front of Shed B became common. They would stand with their hands cupped to the sides of their faces to block the light, peering in through the windows running across the front of the big garage door. They looked like sidewalk superintendents at a building site. Sometimes they went inside, too (never alone, though; when it came to Shed B, the buddy system ruled), and they always looked younger when they did, like kids creeping into the local graveyard on a dare.

  Curt cleared his throat. The sound made the other two jump, then laugh nervously. "Let's go inside and call the Sarge," he said, and this time

  Now: Sandy

  ". . . and that time I didn't say anything. Just went along like a good boy."

  My throat was as dry as an old chip. I looked at my watch and wasn't exactly surprised to see that over an hour had gone by. Well, that was all right; I was off duty. The day was murkier than ever, but the faint mutters of thunder had slid away south of us.

  "Those old days," someone said, sounding both sad and amused at the same time--it's a trick only the Jews and the Irish seem to manage with any grace. "We thought we'd strut forever, didn't we?"

  I glanced around and saw Huddie Rover, now dressed in civilian clothes, sitting on Ned's left. I don't know when he joined us. He had the same honest Farmer John face he'd worn through the world back in "79, but now there were lines bracketing the corners of his mouth, his hair was mostly gray, and it had gone out like the tide, revealing a long, bright expanse of brow. He was, I judged, about the same age Ennis Rafferty had been when Ennis did his Judge Crater act. Huddie's retirement plans involved a Winnebago and visits to his children and grandchildren. He had them everywhere, so far as I could make out, including the province of Manitoba. If you asked--or even if you didn't--he'd show you a US map with all his proposed routes of travel marked in red.

  "Yeah," I said. "I guess we did, at that. When did you arrive, Huddie?"

  "Oh, I was passing by and heard you talking about Mister Dillon. He was a good old doggie, wasn't he? Remember how he'd roll over on his back if anyone said You're under arrest?"

  "Yeah," I said, and we smiled at each other, the way men do over love or history.

  "What happened to him?" Ned asked.

  "Punched his card," Huddie said. "Eddie Jacubois and I buried him right over there." He pointed toward the scrubby field that stretched up a hill north of the barracks. "Must be fifteen years ago. Would you say, Sandy?"

  I nodded. It was actually fourteen years, almost to the day.

  "I guess he was old, huh?" Ned asked.

  Phil Candleton said, "Getting up there, yes, but--"

  "He was poisoned," Huddie said in a rough, outraged voice, and then said no more.

  "If you want to hear the rest of this story--" I began.

  "I do, "Ned replied at once. .

  "--then I need to wet my whistle."

  I started to get up just as Shirley came out with a tray in her hands. On it was a plate of thick sandwiches--ham and cheese, roast beef, chicken--and a big pitcher of Re
d Zinger iced tea. "Sit back down, Sandy," she said. "I got you covered."

  "What are you, a mind reader?"

  She smiled as she set the tray down on the bench. "Nope. I just know that men get thirsty when they talk, and that men are always hungry. Even the ladies get hungry and thirsty from time to time, believe it or not. Eat up, you guys, and I expect you to put away at least two of these sandwiches yourself, Ned Wilcox. You're too damn thin."

  Looking at the loaded tray made me think of Bibi Roth, talking with Tony and Ennis while his crew--his children, much older than Ned was now--drank iced tea and gobbled sandwiches made in the same kitchenette, nothing different except for the color of the tiles on the floor and the microwave oven. Time is also held together by chains, I think.

  "Yes, ma'am, okay."

  He gave her a smile, but I thought it was dutiful rather than spontaneous; he kept looking over at Shed B. He was under the spell of the thing now, as so many men had been over the years. Not to mention one good dog. And as I drank my first glass of iced tea, cold and good going down my parched throat, loaded with real sugar rather than that unsatisfying artificial shit, I had time to wonder if I was doing Ned Wilcox any favors. Or if he'd even believe the rest of it. He might just get up, walk away all stiff-shouldered and angry, believing I'd been making a game of him and his grief. It wasn't impossible. Huddie, Arky, and Phil would back me up--so would Shirley, for that matter. She hadn't been around when the Buick came in, but she'd seen plenty--and done plenty -since taking the dispatch job in the mid-eighties. The kid still might not believe it, though. It was a lot to swallow.

  Too late to back out now, though.

  "What happened about Trooper Rafferty?" Ned asked.

  "Nothing," Huddie said. "He didn't even get his ugly mug on the side of a milk carton."

  Ned gazed at him uncertainly, not sure if Huddie was joking or not.

  "Nothing happened," Huddie repeated, more quietly this time. "That's the insidious thing about disappearing, son. What happened to your dad was terrible, and I'd never try to convince you any different. But at least you know. That's something, isn't it? There's a place where you can go and visit, where you can lay down flowers. Or take your college acceptance letter."

  "That's just a grave you're talking about," Ned said. He spoke with a strange patience that made me uneasy. "There's a piece of ground, and there's a box under it, and there's something in the box that's dressed in my father's uniform, but it's not my father."

  "But you know what happened to him," Huddie insisted. "With Ennis . . ." He spread his hands with the palms down, then turned them up, like a magician at the end of a good trick.

  Arky had gone inside, probably to take a leak. Now he came back and sat down. , "All quiet?" I asked.

  "Well, yes and no, Sarge Steff tole me to tell you she's getting dose bursts of interference on d'radio again, dose l'il short ones. You know what I mean. Also, DSS is kaputnik. Jus' dat sign on the TV screen dat say STAND BY SEARCHING FOR SIGNAL."

  Steff was Stephanie Colucci, Shirley's second-shift replacement in dispatch and old Andy Colucci's niece. The DSS was our little satellite dish, paid for out of our own pockets, like the exercise equipment in the corner upstairs (a year or two ago someone tacked a poster to the wall beside the free weights, showing buff biker types working out in the prison yard up at Shabene--THEY NEVER TAKE A DAY OFF is the punchline beneath).

  Arky and I exchanged a glance, then looked over at Shed B. If the microwave oven in the kitchenette wasn't on the fritz now, it soon would be. We might lose the lights and the phone, too, although it had been awhile since that had happened.

  "We took up a collection for that rotten old bitch he was married to," Huddie said. "That was mighty big of Troop D, in my view."

  "I thought it was to shut her up," Phil said.

  "Wasn't nothing going to shut that one up," Huddie said. "She meant to have her say. Anyone who ever met her knew that."

  "It wasn't exactly a collection and he wasn't married to her," I said. "The woman was his sister. I thought I made that clear."

  "He was married to her," Huddie insisted. "They were like any old couple, with all the yaps and grumps and sore places. They did everything married folks do except for the old in-out, and for all I know--"

  "Snip, snip, bite your lip," Shirley said mildly.

  "Yeah," Huddie said. "I s'pose."

  "Tony passed the hat, and we all tossed in as much as we could," I told Ned. "Then Buck Flanders's brother--he's a stockbroker in Pittsburgh--invested it for her. It was Tony's idea to do it that way rather than just hand her a check."

  Huddie was nodding. "He brought it up at that meeting he called, the one in the back room at The Country Way. Taking care of The Dragon was just about the last item on the agenda."

  Huddie turned directly to Ned.

  "By then we knew nobody was going to find Ennis, and that Ennis wasn't just going to walk into a police station somewhere in Bakersfield, California, or Nome, Alaska, with a case of amnesia from a knock on the head. He was gone. Maybe to the same place the fella in the black coat and hat went off to, maybe to some other place, but gone either way. There was no body, no signs of violence, not even any clothes, but Ennie was gone." Huddie laughed. It was a sour sound. "Oh, that bad-natured bitch he lived with was so wild. Of course she was half-crazy to begin with--"

  "More dan half," Arky said complacently, and helped himself to a ham and cheese sandwich. "She call all d'time, tree-four times a day, made Matt Babicki in dispatch jus" about tear his hair out. You should count your blessings she's gone, Shirley. Edit' Hyams! What a piece of work!"

  "What did she think had happened?" Ned asked.

  "Who knows?" I said. "That we killed him over poker debts, maybe, and buried him in the cellar."

  "You played poker in the barracks back then?" Ned looked both fascinated and horrified. "Did my father play?"

  "Oh, please," I said. "Tony would have scalped anyone he caught playing poker in the barracks, even for matches. And I'd do exactly the same. I was joking."

  "We're not firemen, boy," Huddie said with such disdain that I had to laugh. Then he returned to the subject at hand. "That old woman believed we had something to do with it because she hated us. She would have hated anyone that distracted Ennis's attention from her. Is hate too strong a word, Sarge?"

  "No," I said.

  Huddie once more turned to Ned. "We took his time and we took his energy. And I think the part of Ennis's life that was the most vivid was the part he spent here, or in his cruiser. She knew that, and she hated it--'the job, the job, the job," she'd say. "That's all he cares about, his damned jot." As far as she was concerned, we must have taken his life. Didn't we take everything else?"

  Ned looked bewildered, perhaps because hate of the job had never been a part of his own home life. Not that he'd seen, anyway. Shirley laid a gentle hand on his knee. "She had to hate somebody, don't you see? She had to blame somebody."

  Ned looked pale and thoughtful. Maybe a few hateful thoughts had crossed his own mind. Surely it had occurred to him that if not for the gray uniform, his dad would still be alive.

  I said, "Edith called, Edith hectored us, Edith wrote letters to her Congressman and to the state Attorney General, demanding a full investigation. I think Tony knew all that was in the offing, but he went right ahead with the meeting we had a few nights later, and laid out his proposal to take care of her. If we didn't, he said, no one would. Ennis hadn't left much, and without our help she'd be next door to destitute. Ennis had insurance and was eligible for his pension--probably eighty per cent of full by then--but she wouldn't see a penny of either one for a long time. Because--"

  "--he just disappeared," Ned said.

  "Right. So we got up a subscription for The Dragon. A couple of thousand dollars, all told, with Troopers from Lawrence, Beaver, and Mercer also chipping in. Buck Flanders's brother put it in computer stocks, which were brand-new then, and she ended up making a small fortune
.

  "As for Ennis, a story started going around the various troops over here in "western PA that he'd run off to Mexico. He was always talking about Mexico, and reading magazine stories about it. Pretty soon it was being taken as gospel: Ennis had run away from his sister before she could finish the job of cutting him up with that Ginsu Knife tongue of hers. Even guys who knew better--or should have--started telling that story after awhile, guys who were in the back room of The Country Way when Tony Schoondist said right out loud that he believed the Buick in Shed B had something to do with Ennie's disappearance."

  "Stopped just short of calling it a transporter unit from Planet X," Huddie said.

  "Sarge was very forceful dat night," Arky said, sounding so much like Lawrence Welk--Now here's da lovely Alice-uh Lon--that I had to raise my hand to cover a smile.

  "When she wrote her Congressman, I guess she didn't talk about what you guys had over there in the Twilight Zone, did she?" Ned asked.

  "How could she?" I asked. "She didn't know. That was the main reason Sergeant Schoondist called the meeting. Basically it was to remind us that loose lips sink sh--"

  "What's that?" Ned asked, half-rising from the bench. I didn't even have to look to know what he was seeing, but of course I looked anyway. So did Shirley, Arky, and Huddie. You couldn't not look, couldn't not be fascinated. None of us had ever pissed and howled over the Roadmaster like poor old Mister D, but on at least two occasions I had screamed.

  Oh yes. I had damned near screamed my guts out. And the nightmares afterward. Man oh man.

  The storm had gone away to the south of us, except in a way it hadn't. In a way it had been caged up inside of Shed B. From where we sat on the smokers" bench we could see bright, soundless explosions of light going off inside. The row of windows in the roll-up door would be as black as pitch, and then they'd turn blue-white. And with each flash, I knew, the radio in dispatch would give out another bray of static. Instead of showing 5:18 PM, the clock on the microwave would be reading ERROR.