From a Buick 8 Page 16

  "Don't you pull me back!" Curt shouts. "Don't do it! I'm five-by-five!" And with that, he opens the door of the Roadmaster.

  "Stay out of there!" Tony calls from behind the madly jiggling camera.

  Curt ignores him and pulls the plastic gerbil condo out of the car, waggling it gently back and forth to get it past the big steering wheel. He uses his knee to shut the Buick's door and then comes back to the shed door with the habitat cradled in his arms. With a square room at either end, the thing looks like some strange sort of plastic dumbbell.

  "Get it on tape!" Curt is shouting, all but frying with excitement. "Get it on tape!"

  Tony did. The picture zooms in on the left end of the environment just as soon as Curt steps out of the shed and back into the sun. And here is Roslyn, no longer eating but scurrying about cheerfully enough. She becomes aware of the men gathered around her and turns directly toward the camera, sniffing at the yellow plastic, whiskers quivering, eyes bright and interested. It was cute, but the Troopers from Statler Barracks D weren't interested in cute just then.

  The camera makes a herky-jerky pan away from her, traveling along the empty corridor to the empty gerbil gym at the far end. Both of the environment's hatches are latched tight, and nothing bigger than a gnat could get through the hole for the water-tube, but Jimmy the gerbil is gone, just the same --just as gone as Ennis Rafferty or the man with the Boris Badinoff accent, who had driven the Buick Roadmaster into their lives to begin with.

  Now: Sandy

  I came to a stop and swallowed a glass of Shirley's iced tea in four long gulps. That planted an icepick in the center of my forehead, and I had to wait for it to melt.

  At some point Eddie Jacubois had joined us. He was dressed in his civvies and sitting at the end of the bench, looking both sorry to be there and reluctant to leave. I had no such divided feelings; I was delighted to see him. He could tell his part. Huddie would help him along, if he needed helping; Shirley, too. By 1988 she'd been with us two years, Matt Babicki nothing but a memory refreshed by an occasional postcard showing palm trees in sunny Sarasota, where Matt and his wife own a learn-to-drive school. A very successful one, at least according to Matt.

  "Sandy?" Ned asked. "Are you all right?"

  "I'm fine. I was just thinking about how clumsy Tony was with that video camera," I said. "Your dad was great, Ned, a regular Steven Spielberg, but--"

  "Could I watch those tapes if I wanted to?" Ned asked.

  I looked at Huddie . . . Arky . . . Phil . . . Eddie. In each set of eyes I saw the same thing: It's your call. As of course it was. When you sit in the big chair, you make all the big calls. And mostly I like that. Might as well tell the truth.

  "Don't see why not," I said. "As long as it's here. I wouldn't be comfortable with you taking them out of the barracks--you'd have to call them Troop D property--but here? Sure. You can run em on the VCR in the upstairs lounge. You ought to take a Dramamine before you look at the stuff Tony shot, though. Right, Eddie?"

  For a moment Eddie looked across the parking lot, but not toward where the Roadmaster was stored. His gaze seemed to rest on the place where Shed A had been until 1982 or thereabouts. "I dunno much about that," he said. "Don't remember much. Most of the big stuff was over by the time I got here, you know."

  Even Ned must have known the man was lying; Eddie was spectacularly bad at it.

  "I just came out to tell you I put in those three hours I owed from last May, Sarge--you know, when I took off to help my brother-in-law build his new studio?"

  "Ah," I said.

  Eddie bobbed his head up and down rapidly. "Uh-huh. I'm all clocked out, and I put the report on those marijuana plants we found in Robbie Rennerts's back field on your desk. So I'll just be heading on home, if it's all the same to you."

  Heading down to The Tap was what he meant. His home away from home. Once he was out of uniform, Eddie J.'s life was a George Jones song. He started to get up and I put a hand on his wrist. "Actually, Eddie, it's not."

  "Huh?"

  "It's not all the same to me. I want you to stick around awhile."

  "Boss, I really ought to--"

  "Stick around," I repeated. "You might owe this kid a little something."

  "I don't know what--"

  "His father saved your life, remember?"

  Eddie's shoulders came up in a kind of defensive hunch. "I don't know if I'd say he exactly--"

  "Come on, get off it," Huddie said. "I was there."

  Suddenly Ned wasn't so interested in videotapes. "My father saved your life, Eddie? How?"

  Eddie hesitated, then gave in. "Pulled me down behind a John Deere tractor. The O'Day brothers, they--"

  "The spine-tingling saga of the O'Day brothers is a story for another time," I said. "The point is, Eddie, we're having us a little exhumation party here, and you know where one of the bodies is buried. And I mean quite literally."

  "Huddie and Shirley were there, they can--"

  "Yeah, they were. George Morgan was there, too, I think--"

  "He was," Shirley said quietly.

  "--but so what?" I still had my hand on Eddie's wrist, and had to fight a desire to squeeze it again. Hard. I liked Eddie, always had, and he could be brave, but he also had a yellow streak. I don't know how those two things can exist side by side in the same man, but they can; I've seen it more than once. Eddie froze back in "96, on the day Travis and Tracy O'Day started firing their fancy militia machine-guns out of their farmhouse windows. Curt had to break cover and yank him to safety by the back of his jacket. And now here he was trying to squiggle out of his part in the other story, the one in which Ned's father had played such a key role. Not because he'd done anything wrong--he hadn't--but because the memories were painful and frightening.

  "Sandy, I really ought to get toddling. I've got a lot of chores I've been putting off, and--"

  "We've been telling this boy about his father," I said. "And what I think you ought to do, Eddie, is sit there quiet, maybe have a sandwich and a glass of iced tea, and wait until you have something to say."

  He settled back on the end of the bench and looked at us. I know what he saw in the eyes of Curt's boy: puzzlement and curiosity. We'd become quite a little Council of Elders, though, surrounding the young fellow, singing him our warrior-songs of the past. And what about when the songs were done? If Ned had been a young Indian brave, he might have been sent out on some sort of dream quest--kill the right animal, have the right vision while the blood of the animal's heart was still smeared around his mouth, come back a man. If there could be some sort of test at the end of this, I reflected, some way in which Ned could demonstrate new maturity and understanding, things might have been a lot simpler. But that's not the way things work nowadays. At least not by and large. These days it's a lot more about how you feel than what you do. And I think that's wrong.

  And what did Eddie see in our eyes? Resentment? A touch of contempt? Perhaps even the wish that it had been him who had flagged down the truck with the flapper rather than Curtis Wilcox, that it had been him who had gotten turned inside-out by Bradley Roach? Always-almost-overweight Eddie Jacubois, who drank too much and would probably be making a little trip to Scranton for a two-week stay in the Member Assistance Program if he didn't get a handle on his drinking soon? The guy who was always slow filing his reports and who almost never got the punchline of a joke unless it was explained to him? I hope he didn't see any of those things, because there was another side to him--a better side--but I can't say for sure he didn't see at least some of them. Maybe even all of them.

  "--about the big picture?"

  I turned to Ned, glad to be diverted from the uncomfortable run of my own thoughts. "Come again?"

  "I asked if you ever talked about what the Buick really was, where it came from, what it meant. If you ever discussed, you know, the big picture."

  "Well . . . there was the meeting at The Country Way," I said. I didn't quite see where he was going. "I told you about that--"
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  "Yeah, but that one sounded, you know, more administrative than anything else--"

  "You do okay in college," Arky said, and patted him on the knee. "Any kid can say a word like dat, jus" roll it out, he bound t'do okay in college."

  Ned grinned. "Administrative. Organizational. Bureaucratized. Compartmentalized."

  "Quit showing off, kiddo," Huddie said. "You're giving me a headache."

  "Anyway, the thing at The Country Way's not the kind of meeting I'm talking about. You guys must've ... I mean, as time went on you must have . . ."

  I knew what he was trying so say, and I knew something else at the same time: the boy would never quite understand the way it had really been. How mundane it had been, at least on most days. On most days we had just gone on. The way people go on after seeing a beautiful sunset, or tasting a wonderful champagne, or getting bad news from home. We had the miracle of the world out behind our workplace, but . that didn't change the amount of paperwork we had to do or the way we brushed our teeth or how we made love to our spouses. It didn't lift us to new realms of existence or planes of perception. Our asses still itched, and we still scratched them when they did.

  "I imagine Tony and your Either talked it over a lot," I said, "but at work, at least for the rest of us, the Buick gradually slipped into the background like any other inactive case. It--"

  "Inactive!" He nearly shouted it, and sounded so much like his father it was frightening. It was another chain, I thought, this link between father and son. The chain had been mangled, but it wasn't broken.

  "For long periods of time, it was," I said. "Meantime, there were fender-benders and hit-and-runs and burglaries and dope and the occasional homicide."

  The look of disappointment on Ned's face made me feel bad, as if I'd let him down. Ridiculous, I suppose, but true. Then something occurred to me. "I can remember one bull-session about it. It was at--"

  "--the picnic," Phil Candleton finished. "Labor Day picnic. That's what you're thinking about, right?"

  I nodded. 1979. The old Academy soccer field, down by Redfern Stream. We all liked the Labor Day picnic a lot better than the one on the Fourth of July, partially because it was a lot closer to home and the men who had families could bring them, but mostly because it was just us --just Troop D. The Labor Day picnic really was a picnic.

  Phil put his head back against the boards of the barracks and laughed. "Man, I'd almost forgotten about it. We talked about that damn yonder Buick, kid, and just about nothing else. More we talked, the more we drank. My head ached for two days after."

  Huddie said: "That picnic's always a good time. You were there last summer, weren't you, Ned?"

  "Summer before last," Ned said. "Before Dad died." He was smiling. "That tire swing that goes out over the water? Paul Loving fell out of it and sprained his knee."

  We all laughed at that, Eddie as loud as the rest of us.

  "A lot of talk and not one single conclusion," I said. "But what conclusions could we draw? Only one, really: when the temperature goes down inside that shed, things happen. Except even that turned out not to be a hard and fast rule. Sometimes--especially as the years went by--the temperature would go down a little, then rebound. Sometimes that humming noise would start . . . and then it would stop again, just cut out as if someone had pulled the plug on a piece of electrical equipment. Ennis disappeared with no lightshow and Jimmy the gerbil disappeared after a humungous lightshow and Roslyn didn't disappear at all."

  "Did you put her back into the Buick?" Ned asked.

  "Nah," Phil said. "This is America, kid--no double jeopardy."

  "Roslyn lived the rest of her life upstairs in the common room," I said. "She was three or four when she died. Tony said that was a fairly normal lifespan for a gerbil."

  "Did more things come out of it? Out of the Buick?"

  "Yes. But you couldn't correlate the appearance of those things with--"

  "What sort of things? And what about the bat? Did my father ever get around to dissecting it? Can I see it? Are there pictures, at least? Was it--"

  "Whoa, hold on," I said, raising my hand. "Eat a sandwich or something. Chill out."

  He picked up a sandwich and began to nibble, his eyes looking at me over the top. For just a moment he made me think of Roslyn the gerbil turning to look into the lens of the video camera, eyes bright and whiskers twitching.

  "Things appeared from time to time," I said, "and from time to time things--living things would disappear. Crickets. A frog. A butterfly. A tulip right out of the pot it was growing in. But you couldn't correlate the chill, the hum, or the lightshows with either the disappearances or what your dad called the Buick's miscarriages. Nothing really correlates. The chill is pretty reliable, there's never been one of those fireworks displays without a preceding temperature-drop--but not every temperature-drop means a display. Do you see what I mean?"

  "I think so," Ned said. "Clouds don't always mean rain, but you don't get rain without them."

  "I couldn't have put it more neatly," I said.

  Huddie tapped Ned on the knee. "You know how folks say, "There's an exception to every rule?" Well, in the case of the Buick, we've got about one rule and a dozen exceptions. The driver himself is one--you know, the guy in the black coat and black hat. He disappeared, but not from the vicinity of the Buick."

  "Can you say that for sure?" Ned asked.

  It startled me. For a boy to look like his father is natural. To sound like his father, too. But for a moment there, Ned's voice and looks combined to make something more than a resemblance. Nor was I the only one who felt that. Shirley and Arky exchanged an uneasy glance.

  "What do you mean?" I asked him.

  "Roach was reading a newspaper, wasn't he? And from the way you described him, that probably took most of his concentration. So how do you know the guy didn't come back to his car?"

  I'd had twenty years to think about that day and the consequences of that day. Twenty years, and the idea of the Roadmaster's driver coming back (perhaps even sneaking back) had never once occurred to me. Or, so far as I knew, to anyone else. Brad Roach said the guy hadn't returned, and we'd simply accepted that. Why? Because cops have built-in bullshit detectors, and in that case none of the needles swung into the red. Never even twitched, really. Why would they? Brad Roach at least thought he was telling the truth. That didn't mean he knew what he was talking about, though.

  "I guess that it's possible," I said.

  Ned shrugged as if to say, Well there you go.

  "We never had Sherlock Holmes or Lieutenant Columbo working out of D Troop," I said. I thought I sounded rather defensive. I felt rather defensive. "When you get right down to it, we're just the mechanics of the legal system. Blue-collar guys who actually wear gray collars and have a slightly better than average education. We can work the phones, compile evidence if there's evidence to compile, make the occasional deduction. On good days we can make fairly brilliant deductions. But with the Buick there was no consistency, hence no basis for deduction, brilliant or otherwise."

  "Some of the guys thought it came from space," Huddle said. "That it was . . . oh, I don't know, a disguised scout-ship, or something. They had the idea Ennis was abducted by an ET disguised to look at least passably human in his--its--black coat and hat. This talk was at the picnic--the Labor Day picnic, okay?"

  "Yeah," Ned said.

  "That was one seriously weird get-together, kiddo," Huddie said. "It seems to me that everyone got a lot drunker'n usual, and a lot faster, but no one got rowdy, not even the usual suspects like Jackie O'Hara and Christian Soder. It was very quiet, especially once the shirts-and-skins touch football game was over.

  "I remember sitting on a bench under an elm tree with a bunch of guys, all of us moderately toasted, listening to Brian Cole tell about these flying saucer sightings around the powerlines in New Hampshire--only a few years before, that was--and how some woman claimed to have been abducted and had all these probes stuck up inside her, entrance
ramps and exit ramps both."

  "Is that what my father believed? That aliens abducted his partner?"

  "No," Shirley said. "Something happened here in 1988 that was so . . . so outrageous and beyond belief . . . so fucking awful. . ."

  "What?" Ned asked. "For God's sake, what?

  Shirley ignored the question. I don't think she even heard it. "A few days afterward, I asked your father flat-out what he believed. He said it didn't matter."

  Ned looked as if he hadn't heard her correctly. "It didn't matter?"

  "That's what he said. He believed that, whatever the Buick was, it didn't matter in the great scheme of things. In that big picture you were talking about. I asked him if he thought someone was using it, maybe to watch us . . . if it was some sort of television . . . and he said, "I think it's forgotten." I still remember the flat, certain way he said it, as if he was talking about ... I don't know . . . something as important as a king's treasure buried under the desert since before the time of Christ or something as unimportant as a postcard with the wrong address sitting in a Dead Letter file somewhere. "Having a wonderful time, wish you were here" and who cares, because all that was long, long ago. It comforted me and at the same time it chilled me to think anything so strange and awful could just be forgotten . . . misplaced . . . overlooked. I said that, and your dad, he laughed. Then he flapped his arm at the western horizon and he said, "Shirley, tell me something. How many nuclear weapons do you think this great nation of ours has got stored out there in various places between the Pennsylvania-Ohio line and the Pacific Ocean? And how many of them do you think will be left behind and forgotten over the next two or three centuries?"

  We were all silent for a moment, thinking about this.

  "I was considering quitting the job," Shirley said at last. "I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about poor old Mister Dillon, and in my mind quitting was almost a done deal. It was Curt who talked me into staying, and he did it without even knowing he was doing it. "I think it's forgotten," he said, and that was good enough for me. I stayed, and I've never been sorry, either. This is a good place, and most of the guys who work here are good Troops. That goes for the ones who are gone, too. Like Tony."