From a Buick 8 Read online

  They both looked, and uttered almost identical cries of revulsion. The fish was blown out all down its length by then, and deflating--sinking into the black liquor of its own strange blood. White billows rose from its body and the innards which had already spilled from that gaping flayment. The vapor was as thick as smoke rising from a pile of smoldering damp mulch. It obscured the Buick from its open trunk forward until Old '54 was nothing but a ghost-car.

  If there had been more to see, Sandy might actually have fumbled longer with the camera, perhaps getting the battery in wrongways on the first try or even knocking the whole works over and breaking it in his fumble-fingered haste. The fact that there was going to be damned little to tape no matter how fast he worked had a calming effect, and he snapped the battery home on the first try. When he looked into the viewfinder again, he had a clear, bright view of not much: a disappearing amphibious thing that might have been a fabulous landlocked sea monster or just a fishy version of the Cardiff Giant sitting on a concealed block of dry ice. On the tape one can see the pink tangle that served as the amphibian's head quite clearly for perhaps ten seconds, and a number of rapidly liquefying red lumps strewn along its length; one can see what appears to be filthy seafoam sweating out of the thing's tail and running across the concrete in a sluggish rill. Then the creature that convulsed its bulk out of the Roadmaster's trunk is mostly gone, no more than a shadow in the mist. The car itself is hardly there. Even in the mist, however, the open trunk is visible, and it looks like a gaping mouth. Come closer, children, see the living crocodile.

  George stepped away, gagging and shaking his head. "Man, that smell!"

  Sandy thought again of Curtis, who for a change had left as soon as his shift was over. He and Michelle had big plans--dinner at The Cracked Platter in Harrison, followed by a movie. The meal would be over by now and they'd be at the show. Which one? There were three within striking distance. If there had been kids instead of just a maybe baby, Sandy could have called the house and asked the sitter. But would he have made that call? Maybe not. Probably not, in fact. Curt had begun to settle a bit over the last eighteen months or so, and Sandy hoped that settling would continue. He had heard Tony say on more than one occasion that when it came to the PSP (or any law enforcement agency worth its salt), one could best assess a man's worth by the truthful answer to a single question: How are things at home? It wasn't just that the job was dangerous; it was also a crazy job, full of opportunities to see people at their absolute worst. To do it well over a long period of time, to do it fairly, a cop needed an anchor. Curt had Michelle, and now he had the baby (maybe). It would be better if he didn't go bolting off to the barracks unless he absolutely had to, especially when he had to lie about the reason. A wife could swallow only so many rabid fox-tales and unexpected changes in the duty roster. He'd be angry that he hadn't been called, angrier still when he saw the bitched-up videotape, but Sandy would deal with that. He'd have to. And Tony would be back. Tony would help him deal with it.

  The following day was cool, with a fresh breeze. They rolled up Shed B's big doors and let the place air out for six hours or so. Then four Troopers, led by Sandy and a stony-faced Trooper Wilcox, went in with hoses. They cleaned off the concrete and washed the final decaying lumps of the fish out into the tall grass behind the shed. It was really the story of the bat all over again, only with more mess and less to show at the end of the day. In the end it was more about Curtis Wilcox and Sandy Dearborn than it was about the ruins of that great unknown fish.

  Curt was indeed furious at not having been called, and the two law enforcement officers had an extremely lively discussion on that subject--and others--when they had gotten to a place where no one else on the roster could possibly overhear. This turned out to be the parking lot behind The Tap, where they had gone for a beer after the clean-up operation was finished. In the bar it was just talking, but once outside, their voices started to climb. Pretty soon they were both trying to talk at the same time, and of course that led to shouting. It almost always does.

  Man, I can't believe, you didn't call me.

  You were off-duty, you were out with your wife, and besides, there was nothing to see.

  I wish you'd let me decide--

  There wasn't--

  --decide that, Sandy--

  --any time! It all happened--

  Least you could have done was get some half-decent video for the file--

  Whose file are we talking about, Curtis? Huh? Whose goddam file?

  By then the two of them were standing nose to nose, fists clenched, almost down to it. Yes, really on the verge of getting down to it. There are moments in a life that don't matter and moments that do and some--maybe a dozen--"when everything is on a hinge. Standing there in the parking lot, wanting to sock the kid who was no longer a kid, the rookie who was no longer a rookie, Sandy realized he had come to one of those moments. He liked Curt, and Curt liked him. They had worked together well over the last years. But if this went any farther, all that would change. It depended on what he said next.

  "It smelled like a basket of minks." That was what he said. It was a remark that came from nowhere at all, at least nowhere he could pinpoint. "Even from the outside."

  "How would you know what a basket of minks smelled like?" Curt starting to smile. Just a little.

  "Call it poetic license." Sandy also starting to smile, but also only a little. They had turned in the right direction, but they weren't out of the woods.

  Then Curtis asked: "Did it smell worse than that whore's shoes? The one from Rocksburg?"

  Sandy started laughing. Curt joined him. And they were off the hinge, just like that.

  "Come on in," Curt said. "I'll buy you another beer."

  Sandy didn't want another beer, but he said okay. Because now it wasn't about beer; it was about damage control. About putting the crap behind them.

  Back inside, sitting in a corner booth, Curt said: "I've had my hands in that trunk, Sandy. I've knocked on the bottom of it."

  "Me too."

  "And I've been under it on a crawler. It's not a magician's trick, like a box with a false bottom."

  "Even if it was, that was no white rabbit that came out of there yesterday."

  Curtis said, "For things to disappear, they only have to be in the vicinity. But when things show up, they always come out of the trunk. Do you agree?"

  Sandy thought it over. None of them had actually seen the bat-thing emerge from the Buick's trunk, but the trunk had been open, all right. As for the leaves, yes--Phil Candleton had seen them swirling out.

  "Do you agree?" Impatient now, his voice saying Sandy had to agree, it was so goddarn obvious.

  "It seems likely, but I don't think we have enough evidence to be a hundred per cent sure yet," Sandy replied at last. He knew saying that made him hopelessly stodgy in Curtis's eyes, but it was what he believed. ""One swallow doesn't make a summer." Ever heard that one?"

  Curt stuck out his lower lip and blew an exasperated breath up his face. ""Plain as the nose on your face", ever heard that one?"

  "Curt--"

  Curt raised his hands as if to say no, no, they didn't have to go back out into the parking lot and pick up where they had left off. "I see your point. Okay? I don't agree, but I see it."

  "Okay."

  "Just tell me one thing: when'll we have enough to draw some conclusions? Not about everything, mind you, but maybe a few of the bigger things. Like where the bat and the fish came from, for instance. If I had to settle for just one answer, it'd probably be that one."

  "Probably never."

  Curt raised his hands to the smoke-stained tin ceiling, then dropped them back to the table with a clump. "Gahh! I knew you'd say that! I could strangle you, Dearborn!"

  They looked at each other across the table, across the tops of beers neither one of them wanted, and Curt started to laugh. Sandy smiled. And then he was laughing, too.

  Now: Sandy

  Ned stopped me there. He wanted
to go inside and call his mother, he said. Tell her he was okay, just eating dinner at the barracks with Sandy and Shirley and a couple of the other guys. Tell her lies, in other words. As his father had before him.

  "Don't you guys move," he said from the doorway. "Don't you move a red inch."

  When he was gone, Huddie looked at me. His broad face was thoughtful. "You think telling him all this stuff is a good idea, Sarge?"

  "He gonna want to see all dose ole tapes, nex' t'ing," Arky said dolefully. "Hell's own rnovieshow."

  "I don't know if it's a good idea or a bad one," I said, rather peevishly. "I only know that it's a little late to back out now." Then I got up and went inside myself.

  Ned was just hanging up the phone. "Where are you going?" he asked. His brows had drawn together, and I thought of standing nose to nose with his father outside The Tap, the scurgy little bar that had become Eddie J.'s home away from home. That night Curt's brows had drawn together in that exact same way. Like father, like son.

  "Just to the toilet," I said. "Take it easy, Ned, you'll get what you want. What there is to get, anyway. But you have to stop waiting for the punchline."

  I went into the can and shut the door before he had a chance to reply. And the next fifteen seconds or so were pure relief. Like beer, iced tea is something you can't buy, only rent. When I got back outside, the smokers" bench was empty. They had stepped across to Shed B and were looking in, each with his own window in the roll-up door facing the rear of the barracks, each in that sidewalk superintendent posture I knew so well. Only now it's changed around in my mind. It's exactly backwards. Whenever I pass men lined up at a board fence or at sawhorses blocking off an excavation hole, the first things I think of are Shed B and the Buick 8.

  "You guys see anything in there you like better than yourselves?" I called across to them.

  It seemed they didn't. Arky came back first, closely followed by Huddie and Shirley. Phil and Eddie lingered a bit longer, and Curt's boy returned last to the barracks side of the parking lot. Like father like son in this, too. Curtis had also always lingered longest at the window. If, that was, he had time to linger. He wouldn't make time, though, because the Buick never took precedence. If it had, he and I almost certainly would have come to blows that night at The Tap instead of finding a way to laugh and back off. We found a way because us getting into a scrape would have been bad for the Troop, and he kept the Troop ahead of everything--the Buick, his wife, his family when the family came. I once asked him what he was proudest of in his life. This was around 1986, and I imagined he'd say his son. His response was The uniform. I understood that and responded to it, but I'd be wrong not to add that the answer horrified me a little, as well. But it saved him, you know. His pride in the job he did and the uniform he wore held him steady when the Buick might otherwise have unbalanced him, driven him into an obsessional madness. Didn't the job also get him killed? Yes, I suppose. But there were years in between, a lot of good years. And now there was this kid, who was troubling because he didn't have the job to balance him. All he had was a lot of questions, and the naive belief that, just because he felt he needed the answers, those answers would come. Bosh to that, his father might have said.

  "Temp in there's gone down another tick," Huddie said as we all sat down again. "Probably nothing, but she might have another surprise or two left in her. We'd best watch out."

  "What happened after you and my dad almost got into that fight?" Ned asked. "And don't start telling me about calls and codes, either. I know about calls and codes. I'm learning dispatch, remember."

  What was the kid learning, though? After spending a month of officially sanctioned time in the cubicle with the radio and the computers and the modems, what did he really know? The calls and codes, yes, he was a quick study and he sounded as professional as hell when he answered the red phone with State Police Statler, Troop D, this is PCO Wilcox, how can I help?, but did he know that each call and each code is a link in a chain? That there are chains everywhere, each link in each one stronger than the last? How could you expect a kid, even a smart one, to know that? These are the chains we forge in life, to misquote Jacob Marley. We make them, we wear them, and sometimes we share them. George Morgan didn't really shoot himself in his garage; he just got tangled in one of those chains and hung himself. Not, however, until after he'd helped us dig Mister Dillon's grave on one of those brutally hot summer days after the tanker-truck blew over in Poteenville.

  There was no call or code for Eddie Jacubois spending more and more of his time in The Tap; there was none for Andy Colucci cheating on his wife and getting caught at it and begging her for a second chance and not getting it; no code for Matt Babicki leaving; no call for Shirley Pasternak coming. There are just things you can't explain unless you admit a knowledge of those chains, some made of love and some of pure happenstance. Like Orville Garrett down on one knee at the foot of Mister Dillon's fresh grave, crying, putting D's collar on the earth and saying Sorry, partner, sorry.

  And was all that important to my story? I thought it was. The kid, obviously, thought differently. I kept trying to give him a context and he kept repudiating it, just as the Buick's tires repudiated any invasion--yes, right down to the smallest sliver of a pebble that would simply not stay caught between the treads. You could put that sliver of pebble in, but five or ten or fifteen seconds later it would fall back out again. Tony had tried this experiment; I had tried it; this boy's father had tried it time and time and time again, often with videotape rolling. And now here sat the boy himself, dressed in civvies, no gray uniform to balance his interest in the Buick, here he sat repudiating even in the face of his father's undoubtedly dangerous eight-cylinder miracle, wanting to hear the story out of context and out of history, chainless and immaculate. He wanted what suited him. In his anger, he thought he had a right to that. I thought he was wrong, and I was sort of pissed at him myself, but I tell you with all the truth in my heart that I loved him, too. He was so much like his father then, you see. Right down to the let's-play-Bingo-with-the-paycheck look in his eyes.

  "I can't tell you this next part," I said. "I wasn't there."

  I turned to Huddie, Shirley, Eddie J. None of them looked comfortable. Eddie wouldn't meet my gaze at all.

  "What do you say, guys?" I asked them. "PCO Wilcox doesn't want any calls or codes, he just wants the story." I gave Ned a satiric look he either didn't understand or chose not to understand.

  "Sandy, what--" Ned began, but I held up my palm like a traffic cop. I had opened the door to this. Probably opened it the first time I'd gotten to the barracks and seen him out mowing the lawn and hadn't sent him home. He wanted the story. Fine. Let him have it and be done.

  "This boy is waiting. Which of you will help him out? And I want to have all of it. Eddie."

  He jumped as if I'd goosed him, and gave me a nervous look.

  "What was the guy's name? The guy with the cowboy boots and the Nazi necklace?"

  Eddie blinked, shocked. His eyes asked if I was sure. No one talked about that guy. Not, at least, until now. Sometimes we talked about the day of the tanker-truck, laughed about how Herb and that other guy had tried to make up with Shirley by picking her a bouquet of flowers out back (just before the shit hit the fan, that was), but not about the guy in the cowboy boots. Not him. Never. But we were going to talk about him now, by God.

  "Leppler? Lippman? Lippier? It was something like that, wasn't it?"

  "His name was Brian Lippy," Eddie said at last. "Him and me, we went back a little."

  "Did you?" I asked. "I didn't know that."

  I began the next part, but Shirley Pasternak told a surprising amount of the tale (once she came into it, that was), speaking warmly, eyes fixed on Ned's and one of her hands lying on top of his. It didn't surprise me that she should be the one, and it didn't surprise me when Huddie chimed in and began telling it with her, turn and turn about. What surprised me was when Eddie J. began to add first sidelights. . . then footlights. .
. and finally spotlights. I had told him to stick around until he had something to say, but it still surprised me when his time came and he started talking. His voice was low and tentative at first, but by the time he got to the part about discovering that asshole Lippy had kicked out the window, he was speaking strongly and steadily, his voice that of a man who remembers everything and has made up his mind to hide nothing. He spoke without looking at Ned or me or any of us. It was the shed he looked at, the one that sometimes gave birth to monsters.

  Then: Sandy

  By the summer of 1988, the Buick 8 had become an accepted part of Troop D's life, no more or less a part of it than any other. And why not? Given time and a fair amount of goodwill, any freak can become a part of any family. That was what had happened in the nine years since the disappearance of the man in the black coat ("Oil's fine!") and Ennis Rafferty.

  The thing still put on its lightshows from time to time, and both Curt and Tony continued to run experiments from time to time. In 1984, Curtis tried a videocam which could be activated by remote control inside the Buick (nothing happened). In "85, Tony tried much the same thing with a top-of-the-line Wollensak audio recorder (he got a faint off-and-on humming and the distant calling of some crows, nothing more). There were a few other experiments with live test animals. A couple died, but none disappeared.

  On the whole, things were settling down. When the lightshows did happen, they were nowhere near as powerful as the first few (and the whopper in "83, of course). Troop D's biggest problem in those days was caused by someone who knew absolutely nothing about the Buick. Edith Hyams (aka The Dragon) continued to talk to the press (whenever the press would listen, that was) about her brother's disappearance. She continued to insist it was no ordinary disappearance (which once caused Sandy and Curt to muse on just what an "ordinary disappearance" might be). She also continued to insist that Ennis's fellow officers Knew More Than They Were Telling. She was absolutely right on that score, of course. Curt Wilcox said on more than one occasion that if Troop D ever came to grief over the Buick, it would be that woman's doing. As a matter of public policy, however, Ennis's Troop-mates continued to support her. It was their best insurance, and they all knew it. After one of her forays in the press Tony said, "Never mind, boys--time's on our side. Just remember that and keep smilin." And he was right. By the mid-eighties, the representatives of the press were for the most part of longer returning her calls. Even WKML, the tri-country indie station whose Action News at Five broadcasts frequently featured stories about sightings of Sasquatch in the Lassburg Forest and such thoughtful medical briefings as CANCER IN THE WATER SUPPLY! IS YOUR TOWN NEXT?, had begun to lose interest in Edith.