From a Buick 8

  But on the whole, this wasn't a bad one. The flashes of light left afterimages--greenish squares that floated in front of your eyes--but you could look. The first three or four times that pocket storm happened, looking was impossible--it would have fried the eyes right out of your head.

  "Holy God," Ned whispered. His face was long with surprise--

  No, that's too timid. It was shock I saw on his face that afternoon. Nor was shock the end of it. When his eyes cleared a little, I saw the same look of fascination I had seen on his father's face. On Tony's. Huddie's. Matt Babicki's and Phil Candleton's. And hadn't felt it on my own face? It's how we most often appear when we confront the deep and authentic unknown, I think--when we glimpse that place where our familiar universe stops and the real blackness begins.

  Ned turned to me. "Sandy, Jesus Christ, what is it? What is it?"

  "If you have to call it something, call it a lightquake. A mild one. These days, most of them are mild. Want a closer look?"

  He didn't ask if it was safe, didn't ask if it was going to explode in his face or bake the old sperm-factory down below. He just said "Yeah!" Which didn't surprise me in the least.

  We walked over, Ned and I in the lead, the others not far behind. The irregular flashes were very clear in the gloom of the late day, but they registered on the eye even in full sunshine. And when we first took possession (that was right around the time Three Mile Island almost blew, now that I think about it), the Buick Roadmaster in one of its throes literally outshone the sun.

  "Do I need shades?" Ned asked as we approached the shed door. I could now hear the humming from inside--the same hum Ned's father had noticed as he sat behind the Buick's oversized wheel out at the Jenny station.

  "Nah, just squint," Huddie said. "You would have needed shades in "79, though, I can tell you that."

  "You bet your ass," Arky said as Ned put his face to one of the windows, squinting and peering in.

  I slotted myself in next to Ned, fascinated as always. Step right up, see the living crocodile.

  The Roadmaster stood entirely revealed, the tarp it had somehow shrugged off lying crumpled in a tan drift on the driver's side. To me, it looked more like an objet d'art than ever--that big old automotive dinosaur with its curvy lines and hardtop styling, its big wheels and sneermouth grille. Welcome, ladies and gentleman! Welcome to this evening's viewing of From a Buick 8! Just keep a respectful distance, because this is the art that bites!

  It sat there moveless and dead . . . moveless and dead . . . and then the cabin lit up a brilliant flashbulb purple. The oversized steering wheel and the rearview mirror stood out with absolute dark clarity, like objects on the horizon during an artillery barrage. Ned gasped and put up a hand to shield his face.

  It flashed again and again, each silent detonation printing its leaping shadow across the cement floor and up the board wall, where a few tools still hung from the pegs. Now the humming was very clear. I directed my gaze toward the circular thermometer hanging from the beam which ran above the Buick's hood, and when the light bloomed again, I was able to read the temperature easily: fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit. Not great, but not terrible, either. It was mostly when the temperature in Shed B dropped below fifty that you had to worry; fifty-four wasn't a bad number at all. Still, it was best to play safe. We had drawn a few conclusions about the Buick over the years--established a few rules--but we knew better than to trust any of them very far.

  Another of those bright soundless flashes went off inside the Buick, and then there was nothing for almost a full minute. Ned never budged. I'm not sure he even breathed.

  "Is it over?" he asked at last.

  "Wait," I said.

  We gave it another two minutes and when there was still nothing I opened my mouth to say we might as well go back and sit down, the Buick had exhausted its supply of fireworks for tonight. Before I could speak, there was a final monstrous flash. A wavering tendril of light, like a spark from some gigantic cyclotron, shot outward and upward from the Buick's rear passenger window. It rose on a jagged diagonal to the back corner of the shed, where there was a high shelf loaded with old boxes, most filled with hardware oddments. These lit up a pallid, somehow eldritch yellow, as if the boxes were filled with lighted candles instead of orphan nuts, bolts, screws, and springs. The hum grew louder, rattling my teeth and actually seeming to vibrate along the bridge of my nose. Then it quit. So did the light. To our dazzled eyes, the interior of the shed now looked pitch-black instead of just gloomy. The Buick was only a hulk with rounded corners and furtive gleams which marked the chrome facings around its headlights.

  Shirley let out her breath in a long sigh and stepped back from the window where she had been watching. She was trembling. Arky slipped an arm around her shoulders and gave her a comforting hug.

  Phil, who had taken the window to my right, said: "No matter how many times I see it, boss, I never get used to it."

  "What is it?" Ned asked. His awe seemed to have wound ten or twelve years off his face and turned him into a child younger than his sisters. "Why does it happen?"

  "We don't know," I said.

  "Who else knows about it?"

  "Every Trooper who's worked out of Troop D over the last twenty-plus years. Some of the motor-pool guys know. The County Road Commissioner, I think--"

  "Jamieson?" Huddie said. "Yeah, he knows."

  "--and the Statler Township Chief of Police, Sid Brownell. Beyond that, not many."

  We were walking back to the bench now, most of us lighting up. Ned looked like he could use a cigarette himself. Or something. A big knock of whiskey, maybe. Inside the barracks, things would be going back to normal. Steff Colucci would already be noting an improvement in her radio reception, and soon the DSS dish on the roof would be receiving again--all the scores, all the wars, and six Home Shopping stations. If that wouldn't make you forget about the hole in the ozone layer, by God, nothing would.

  "How could folks not know?" Ned asked. "Something as big as this, how could it not get out?"

  "It's not so big," Phil said. "I mean, it's a Buick, son. A Cadillac, now . . . that would be big."

  "Some families can't keep secrets and some families can," I said. "Ours can. Tony Schoondist called that meeting in the The Country Way, two nights after the Buick came in and Ennis disappeared, mostly to make sure we would. Tony briefed us on any number of things that night. Ennis's sister, of course--how we were going to take care of her and how we were supposed to respond to her until she cooled down--"

  "If she ever did, I wasn't aware of it," Huddie said.

  "--and how we were to handle any reporters if she went to the press."

  There had been a dozen Troopers there that night, and with the help of Huddie and Phil, I managed to name most of them. Ned wouldn't have met all of them face to face, but he'd probably heard the names at his dinner table, if his dad talked shop from time to time. Most Troopers do. Not the ugly stuff, of course, not to their families--the spitting and cursing and the bloody messes on the highway--but there's funny stuff, too, like the time we got called out because this Amish kid was roller-skating through downtown Statler, holding on to the tail of a galloping horse and laughing like a loon. Or the time we had to talk to the guy out on the Culverton Road who'd done a snow-sculpture of a naked man and woman in a sexually explicit position. But it's art! he kept yelling. We tried to explain that it wasn't art to the neighbors; they were scandalized. If not for a warm spell and a storm of rain, we probably would have wound up in court on that one.

  I told Ned about how we'd dragged the tables into a big hollow square without having to be asked, and how Brian Cole and "Dicky-Duck" Eliot escorted the waitresses out and closed the doors behind them. We served ourselves from the steam tables which had been set up at the front of the room. Later there was beer, the off-duty Troopers pulling their own suds and running their own tabs, and a fug of blue cigarette smoke rising to the ceiling. Peter Quinland, who owned the restaurant in those days, loved T
he Chairman of the Board, and a steady stream of Frank Sinatra songs rained down on us from the overhead speakers as we ate and drank and smoked and talked: "Luck Be a Lady", "The Autumn Wind", "New York, New York", and of course "My Way", maybe the dumbest pop song of the twentieth century. To this day I can't listen to it--or any Sinatra song, really--without thinking of The Country Way and the Buick out in Shed B.

  Concerning the Buick's missing driver, we were to say we had no name, no description, and no reason to believe the fellow in question had done anything against the law. Nothing about theft of services, in other words. Queries about Ennis were to be taken seriously and treated honestly--up to a point, anyway. Yes, we were all puzzled. Yes, we were all worried. Yes, we had put out watch-and-want bulletins--what we called W2's. Yes, it was possible that Ennis had just pulled up stakes arid moved on. Really, we were instructed to say, anything was possible, and Troop D was doing its best to take care of Trooper Rafferty's sister, a dear lady who was so deeply upset she might say anything.

  "As for the Buick itself, if anyone asks about it at all, tell them it's an impound," Tony had said. "No more than that. If anyone does say more than that, I'll find out who and smoke him out like a cigar." He looked around the room; his men looked back at him, and no one was stupid enough to smile. They'd been around the Sarge long enough to know that when he looked the way he did just then, he was not joking. "Are we clear on this? Everyone got the scoop?"

  A general rumble of agreement had temporarily blotted out The Chairman singing "It was a Very Good Year". We had the scoop, all right.

  Ned held up a hand, and I stopped talking, which was actually a pleasure. I hadn't much wanted to revisit that long-gone meeting in the first place.

  "What about the tests that guy Bibi Roth did?"

  "All inconclusive," I said. "The stuff that looked like vinyl wasn't exactly vinyl--close, but not quite. The paint-chips didn't match up to any of the automotive paints Bibi had samples of. The wood was wood. "Likely oak," Bibi said, but that was all he would say, no matter how much Tony pressed him. Something about it bothered him, but he wouldn't say what."

  "Maybe he couldn't," Shirley said. "Maybe he didn't know."

  I nodded. "The glass in the windows and windshield is plain old sandwich safety glass, but not trademarked. Not installed on any Detroit assembly line, in other words."

  "The fingerprints?"

  I ticked them off on my own fingers. "Ennis. Your father. Bradley Roach. End of story. No prints from the man in the black trenchcoat."

  "He must have been wearing gloves," Ned said.

  "You'd think so, yes. Brad couldn't say for sure, but he thought he remembered seeing the guy's hands and thinking they were as white as his face."

  "People sometimes make up details like that afterwards, though," Huddie commented. "Eyewitnesses aren't as reliable as we'd like them to be."

  "You done philosophizing?" I asked.

  Huddie gave me a grand wave of the hand. "Continue."

  "Bibi found no traces of blood in the car, but fabric samples taken from the interior of the trunk showed microscopic traces of organic matter. Bibi wasn't able to identify any of it, and the stuff-- he called it "soap-scum"--disintegrated. Every slide he took was clear of the stuff in a week. Nothing left but the staining agent he used."

  Huddie raised his hand like a kid in school. I nodded to him.

  "A week later you couldn't see the places where those guys chipped the dashboard and the wheel to get their samples. The wood grew back like skin over a grape. Same with the lining in the trunk. If you scratched a fender with a penknife or a key, six or seven hours later the scratch would be gone."

  "It heals itself?" Ned said. "It can do that?"

  "Yes," Shirley said. She'd lit another Parliament and was smoking it in quick, nervous little puffs. "Your father dragooned me into one of his experiments once--got me to run the video camera. He put a long scratch down the driver's-side door, right under the chrome swoop, and we just let the camera run, came back together every fifteen minutes. It wasn't anything dramatic, like something in a movie, but it was pretty damned amazing. The scratch got shallower and started to darken around the edges, like it was working to match the paintjob. And finally it was just gone. All sign of it."

  "And the tires," Phil Candleton said, taking a turn. "You shoved a screwdriver into one of em, the air'd start to whoosh out just like you'd expect. Only then the whoosh'd thin to a whistle and a few seconds later that would stop, too. Then out comes the screwdriver." Phil pursed his lips and made a thpp sound. "Like spitting out a watermelon seed."

  "Is it alive?" Ned asked me. His voice was so low I could hardly hear it. "I mean, if it can heal itself--"

  "Tony always said it wasn't," I said. "He was vehement on the subject. "Just a gadget," he used to say. "Just some kind of goddam thingamajig we don't understand. "Your dad thought just the opposite, and by the end he was just as vehement as Tony had ever been. If Curtis had lived--"

  "What? If he'd lived, what?"

  "I don't know," I said. All at once I felt dull and sad. There was a lot more to tell, but suddenly I didn't want to tell it. I didn't feel up to it and my heart was heavy with the prospect of it, the way your heart can grow heavy at the prospect of toil which is necessary but hard and stupid--stumps to pull before sundown, hay to bundle into the barn before afternoon rain. "I don't know what would have happened if he'd lived, and that's the God's honest truth."

  Huddie came to my rescue. "Your dad was bullshit about the car, Ned. I mean bug-eyed bullshit. He was out there every spare minute, walking around it, taking pictures of it. . . touching it. That was what he mostly did. Just touching and touching, like to make sure it was real."

  "Sarge d'same way," Arky put in.

  Not exactly, I thought but didn't say. It had been different for Curt. In the end the Buick had been his in a way it had never been Tony's. And Tony had known it.

  "But what about Trooper Rafferty, Sandy? Do you think the Buick--?"

  "Ate im," Huddie said. He spoke with dead flat certainty. "That's what I thought then and it's what I think now. It's what your dad thought, too."

  "Did he?" Ned asked me.

  "Well, yes. Ate him or took him away to someplace else." Again the image of stupid work came to me--rows of beds to be made, stacks of dishes to be washed, acres of hay to be scythed and carried.

  "But you're telling me," Ned said, "that no scientist has ever been allowed to study that thing since Trooper Rafferty and my father found it? Ever? No physicists, no chemists? No one's ever run a spectrographic analysis?"

  "Bibi was back at least once, I think," Phil said, sounding just the tiniest bit defensive. "By himself, though, without those kids he used to travel around with. He and Tony and your father wheeled some big machine in there . . . maybe it was a spectrograph, but I don't know what it showed. Do you, Sandy?"

  I shook my head. There was no one left to answer that question. Or a lot of others. Bibi Roth died of cancer in 1998. Curtis Wilcox, who often walked around the Buick with a spiral notebook in his hands, writing things down (and sometimes sketching), was also dead. Tony Schoondist, alias the old Sarge, was still alive but now in his late seventies, lost in that confused twilit purgatory reserved for people with Alzheimer's disease. I remembered going to see him, along with Arky Arkanian, at the nursing home where he now lives. Just before Christmas, this was. Arky and I brought him a gold St Christopher's medal, which a bunch of us older fellows had chipped in to buy. It had seemed to me that the old Sarge was having one of his good days. He opened the package without much trouble and seemed delighted by the medallion. Even undid the clasp himself, although Arky had to help him do it up again after he'd slipped it on. When that was finally accomplished, Tony had looked at me closely with his brows knit together, his bleary eyes projecting a parody of his old piercing glare. It was a moment when he really seemed himself. Then his eyes filled with tears, and the illusion was gone. "Who are you boys?" he'd ask
ed. "I can almost remember." Then, as matter-of-factly as someone reporting the weather: "I'm in hell, you know. This is hell."

  "Ned, listen," I said. "What that meeting in The Country Way really boiled down to was just one thing. The cops in California have it written on the sides of some of their cruisers, maybe because their memory is a little bit faulty and they have to write it down. We don't. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

  "To serve and protect," Ned said.

  "You got it. Tony thought that thing had come into our hands almost as a result of God's will. He didn't say it that flat-out, but we understood. And your father felt the same way."

  I was telling Ned Wilcox what I thought he needed to hear. What I didn't tell him about was the light in Tony's eyes, and in the eyes of his father. Tony could sermonize about our commitment to serve and protect; he could tell us about how the men of Troop D were the ones best equipped to take care of such a dangerous res; he could even allow as how later on we might turn the thing over to a carefully chosen team of scientists, perhaps one led by Bibi Roth. He could spin all those tales, and did. None of it meant jack shit. Tony and Curt wanted the Buick because they just couldn't bear to let it go. That was the cake, and all the rest of it was just icing. The Roadmaster was strange and exotic, unique, and it was theirs. They couldn't bear to surrender it.

  "Ned," I asked, "would you know if your dad left any notebooks? Spirals, they would have been, like the kind kids take to school."

  Ned's mouth pinched at that. He dropped his head and spoke to a spot somewhere between his knees. "Yeah, all kinds of them, actually. My mom said they were probably diaries. Anyway, in his will, he asked that Mom burn all his private papers, and she did."

  "I guess that makes sense," Huddie said. "It jibes with what I know about Curt and the old Sarge, at least."

  Ned looked up at him.

  Huddie elaborated. "Those two guys distrusted scientists. You know what Tony called them? Death's cropdusters. He said their big mission in life was to spread poison everywhere, telling people to go ahead and eat all they wanted, that it was knowledge and it wouldn't hurt them--that it would set them free." He paused. "There was another issue, too."