From a Buick 8 Read online

  "Where were you, Arky?" he asked. "Where were you when all this was going on?" Across from us, Eddie Jacubois started his pickup truck and the headlights came on.

  "Vacation," Arky said. "On my brudder's farm in Wisconsin. So dat was one mess someone else got to clean up." He said this last with great satisfaction.

  Eddie drove past, giving us a wave. We gave him a little right-back-atcha, Ned along with the rest of us. But he continued to look troubled.

  "I gotta get it in gear, too," Phil said. He disposed of his cigarette butt, got on his feet, hitched up his belt. "Kiddo, leave it at this: your dad was an excellent officer and a credit to Troop D, Statler Barracks." --

  "But I want to know--"

  "It don't matter what you want to know," Phil told him gently. "He's dead, you're not. Those are the facts, as Joe Friday used to say. G'night, Sarge."

  "Night," I said, and watched the two of them, Arky and Phil, walk away together across the parking lot. There was good moonlight by then, enough for me to see that neither man so much as turned his head in the direction of Shed B.

  That left Huddie, Shirley, and me. Plus the boy, of course. Curtis Wilcox's boy who had come and mowed the grass and raked the leaves and erased the snowdrifts when it was too cold for Arky to be outside; dirt's boy who had quit off the football team and come here instead to try and keep his father alive a little longer. I remembered him holding up his college acceptance letter like a judge holding up a score at the Olympics, and I was ashamed to feel angry with him, considering all that he'd been through and how much he'd lost. But he wasn't the only boy in the history of the world to lose his dad, and at least there'd been a funeral, and his father's name was on the marble memorial out front of the barracks, along with those of Corporal Brady Paul, Trooper Albert Rizzo, and Trooper Samuel Stamson, who died in the seventies and is sometimes known in the PSP as the Shotgun Trooper. Until Stamson's death, we carried out shotguns in roof-racks--if you needed the gun, you just had to reach up over your shoulder and grab it. Trooper Stamson was rear-ended while parked in the turnpike breakdown lane, writing up a traffic stop. The guy who hit him was drunk and doing about a hundred and five at the moment of impact. The cruiser accordioned forward. The gas tank didn't blow, but Trooper Stamson was decapitated by his own shotgun rack. Since 1974 we keep our shotguns clipped under the dash, and since 1973 Sam Stamson's name has been on the memorial. "On the rock," we say. Ennis Rafferty is on the books as a disappearance, so he's not on the rock. The official story on Trooper George Morgan is that he died while cleaning his gun (the same Ruger that ended Mister Dillon's misery), and since he didn't die on the job, his name isn't on the rock, either. You don't get on the rock for dying as a result of the job; it was Tony Schoondist who pointed that out to me one day when he saw me looking at the names. "Probably just as well," he said. "We'd have a dozen of those things out here."

  Currently, the last name on the stone is Curtis K. Wilcox. July 2001. Line of duty. It wasn't nice to have your father's name carved in granite when what you wanted--needed--was the father, but it was something. Ennis's name should have been carved there, too, so his bitch of a sister could come and look at it if she wanted to, but it wasn't. And what did she have? A reputation as a nasty old lady, that's what, the kind of person who if she saw you on fire in the street wouldn't piss on you to put you out. She'd been a thorn in our side for years and liking her was impossible but feeling sorry for her was not. She'd ended up with even less than this boy, who at least knew for sure that his father was over, that he was never going to come back in someday with a shamefaced grin and some wild story to explain his empty pockets and how come he had that Tijuana tan and why it hurt like hell each time he had to make a little water.

  I had no good feeling about the night's work. I'd hoped the truth might make things better (it'll set you free, someone said, probably a fool), but I had an idea it had made things worse instead. Satisfaction might have brought the curious cat back, but I could make out zero satisfaction on Ned Wilcox's face. All I saw there was a kind of stubborn, tired curiosity. I'd seen the same look on Curtis's face from time to time, most often when he was standing at one of Shed B's roll-up doors in that sidewalk superintendent's stance,--legs apart, forehead to the glass, eyes squinted a little, mouth thoughtful. But what's passed down in the blood is the strongest chain of all, isn't it? What's mailed along, one generation to the next, good news here, bad news there, complete disaster over yonder.

  I said, "As far as anyone knows, Brian Lippy just took off for greener pastures. It might even be the truth; none of us can say different for certain. And it's an ill wind that doesn't blow somebody some good; him disappearing that way might have saved his girlfriend's life."

  "I doubt it," Huddie rumbled. "I bet her next one was just Brian Lippy with different-colored hair. They pick up guys who beat them until they go through the change. It's like they define themselves through the bruises on their faces and arms."

  "She never filed a missing-persons on him, tell you that," Shirley said. "Not one that came across my desk, anyway, and I see the town and county reports as well as our own. No one in his family did, either. I don't know what happened to her, but he was an authentic case of good riddance to bad rubbish."

  "You don't believe he just slipped out through that broken window and ran away, do you?" Ned asked Huddie. "I mean, you were there."

  "No," Huddie said, "as a matter of fact I don't. But what I think doesn't matter. The point's the same as the one Sarge has been trying to drum into your thick head all night long: we don't know."

  It was as if the kid didn't hear him. He turned back to me. "What about my dad, Sandy? When it came to Brian Lippy, what did he believe?"

  "He and Tony believed that Brian wound up in the same place as Ennis Rafferty and Jimmy the Gerbil. As for the corpse of the thing they killed that day--"

  "Son of a bitch rotted quick," Shirley said in a brisk that-ends-it voice. "There are pictures and you can look at them all you want, but for the most part they're photos of something that could be anything, including a complete hoax. They don't show you how it looked when it was trying to get away from Mister D--how fast it moved or how loud it shrieked. They don't show you anything, really. Nor can we tell you so you'll understand. That's all over your face. Do you know why the past is the past, darling?"

  Ned shook his head.

  "Because it doesn't work." She looked into her pack of cigarettes, and whatever she saw there must have satisfied her because she nodded, put them into her purse, and stood up. "I'm going home. I have two cats that should have been fed three hours ago."

  That was Shirley, all right--Shirley the All-American Girlie, Curt used to call her when he felt like getting under her skin a bit. No husband (there'd been one once, when she was barely out of high school), no kids, two cats, roughly 10,000 Beanie Babies. Like me, she was married to Troop D. A walking cliche, in other words, and if you didn't like it, you could stick it.

  "Shirl?"

  She turned to the plaintive sound in Ned's voice. "What, hon?"

  "Did you like my father?"

  She put her hands on his shoulders, bent down, and planted a kiss on Ned's forehead. "Loved him, kid. And I love you. We've told you all we can, and it wasn't easy. I hope it helps." She paused. "I hope it's enough."

  "I hope so, too," he said.

  Shirley tightened her grip on his shoulders for a moment, giving him a squeeze. Then she let go and stood up. "Hudson Royer--would you see a lady to her car?"

  "My pleasure," he said, and took her arm. "See you tomorrow, Sandy? You still on days?"

  "Bright and early," I said. "We'll do it all again."

  "You better go home and get some sleep, then."

  "I will."

  He and Shirley left. Ned and I sat on the bench and watched them go. We raised our hands as they drove past in their cars--Huddie's big old New Yorker, Shirley in her little Subaru with the bumper sticker reading MY KARMA RAN OVER MY DOGMA. When
their taillights had disappeared around the corner of the barracks, I took out my cigarettes and had my own peek into the pack. One left. I'd smoke it and then quit. I'd been telling myself this charming fable for at least ten years.

  "There's really no more you can tell me?" Ned asked in a small, disillusioned voice.

  "No. It'd never make a play, would it? There's no third act. Tony and your dad ran a few more experiments over the next five years, and finally brought Bibi Roth in on it. That would've been your father persuading Tony and me getting caught in the middle, as usual. And I have to tell you the truth: after Brian Lippy disappeared and Mister Dillon died, I was against doing anything with the Buick beyond keeping an eye on it and offering up the occasional prayer that it would either fall apart or disappear back to where it came from. Oh, and killing anything that came out of the trunk still lively enough to stand up and maybe run around the shed looking for a way out."

  "Did that ever happen?"

  "You mean another pink-headed E.T.? No."

  "And Bibi? What did he say?"

  "He listened to Tony and your dad, he took another look, and then he walked away. He said he was too old to deal with anything so far outside his understanding of the world and its works. He told them he intended to erase the Buick from his memory and urged Tony and Curt to do the same."

  "Oh, for God's sake! This guy was a scientist? Jesus, he should have been fascinated!"

  "Your father was the scientist," I said. "An amateur one, yeah, but a good one. The things that came out of the Buick and his curiosity about the Buick itself, those were the things that made him a scientist. His dissection of the bat-thing, for instance. Crazy as that was, there was something noble about it, too, like the Wright Brothers going up in their little glue-and-paste airplane. Bibi Roth, on the other hand . . . Bibi was a microscope mechanic. He sometimes called himself that, and with absolute pride. He was a person who had carefully and consciously narrowed his vision to a single strip of knowledge, casting a blaze of light over a small area. Mechanics hate mysteries. Scientists--especially amateur scientists--embrace them. Your father was two people at the same time. As a cop, he was a mystery-hater. As a Roadmaster Scholar . . . well, let's just say that when your father was that person, he was very different."

  "Which version did you like better?"

  I thought it over. "That's like a kid asking his parents who they love best, him or his sister. Not a fair question. But the amateur Curt used to scare me. Used to scare Tony a little, too."

  The kid sat pondering this.

  "A few more things appeared," I said. "In 1991, there was a bird with four wings."

  "Four--!"

  "That's right. It flew a little bit, hit one of the walls, and dropped dead. In the fall of 1993, the trunk popped open after one of those lightquakes and it was half-filled with dirt. Curt wanted to leave it there and see what would happen and Tony agreed at first, but then it began to stink. I didn't know dirt could decompose, but I guess it can if it's dirt from the right place. And so . . . this is crazy, but we buried the dirt. Can you believe it?"

  He nodded. "And did my dad keep an eye on the place where it was buried? Sure he did. Just to see what would grow."

  "I think he was hoping for a few of those weird lilies."

  "Any luck?"

  "I guess that depends on what you think of as luck. Nothing sprouted, I'll tell you that much. The dirt from the trunk went into the ground not far from where we buried Mister D and the tools. As for the monster, what didn't turn to goo we burned in the incinerator. The ground where the dirt went is still bare. A few things try to straggle up every spring, but so far they always die. Eventually, I suppose that'll change."

  I put the last cigarette in my mouth and lit it.

  "A year and a half or so after the dirt-delivery, we got another red-stick lizard. Dead. That's been the last. It's still earthquake country in there, but the earth never shakes as hard these days. It wouldn't do to be careless around the Buick any more than it would to be careless around an old rifle just because it's rusty and the barrel's plugged with dirt, but with reasonable precautions it's probably safe enough. And someday--your dad believed it, Tony believed it, and I do too--that old car really will fall apart. All at once, just like the wonderful one-hoss shay in the poem."

  He looked at me vaguely, arid I realized he had no idea what poem I was talking about. We live in degenerate times. Then he said, "I can feel it."

  Something in his tone startled me badly, and I gave him a hard stare. He still looked younger than his eighteen years, I thought. Just a boy, no more than that, sitting with his sneakered feet crossed and his face painted with starlight. "Can you?" I asked.

  "Yes. Can't you?"

  All the Troopers who'd passed through D over the years had felt the pull of it, I guessed. Felt it the way people who live on the coast come to feel the motions of the sea, the tides a clock their hearts beat to. On most days and nights we noticed it no more than you consciously notice your nose, a shape sitting at the bottom of all you see. Sometimes, though, the pull was stronger, and then it made you ache, somehow.

  "All right," I said, "let's say I do. Huddie sure did--what do you think would have happened to him that day if Shirley hadn't screamed when she did? What do you think would have happened to him if he'd crawled into the trunk like he said he had a mind to do?"

  "You really never heard that story before tonight, Sandy?"

  I shook my head.

  "You didn't look all that surprised, even so."

  "Nothing about that Buick surprises me anymore."

  "Do you think he really meant to do it? To crawl in and shut the lid behind him?"

  "Yes. Only I don't think he had anything to do with it. It's that pull--that attraction it has. It was stronger then, but it's still there."

  He made no reply to that. Just sat looking across at Shed B.

  "You didn't answer my question, Ned. What do you think would have happened to him if he'd crawled in there?"

  "I don't know."

  A reasonable enough answer, I suppose--a kid's answer, certainly, they say it a dozen times a day-but I hated it just the same. He'd quit off the football team, but it seemed he hadn't forgotten all he'd learned there about bobbing and weaving. I drew in smoke that tasted like hot hay, then blew it back out. "You don't."

  "No."

  "After Ennis and Jimmy and--probably--Brian Lippy, you don't."

  "Not everything goes on to somewhere else, Sandy. Take the other gerbil, for instance. Rosalie or Roslyn or whatever her name was."

  I sighed. "Have it your way. I'm going down to The Country Way to bite a cheeseburger. You're welcome to join me, but only if we can let this go and talk about something else."

  He thought it over, then shook his head. "Think I'll head home. Do some thinking."

  "Okay, but don't be sharing any of your thinking with your mother."

  He looked almost comically shocked. "God, no!"

  I laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. The shadows had gone out of his face and suddenly it was possible to like him again. As for his questions and his childish insistence that the story must have an ending and the ending must hold some kind of answer, time might take care of it. Maybe I'd been expecting too many of my own answers. The imitation lives we see on TV and in the movies whisper the idea that human existence consists of revelations and abrupt changes of heart; by the time we've reached full adulthood, I think this is an idea we have on some level come to accept. Such things may happen from time to time, but I think that for the most part it's a lie. Life's changes come slowly. They come the way my youngest nephew breathes in his deepest sleep; sometimes I feel the urge to put a hand on his chest just to assure myself he's still alive. Seen in that light, the whole idea of curious cats attaining satisfaction seemed slightly absurd. The world rarely finishes its conversations. If twenty-three years of living with the Buick 8 had taught me nothing else, it should have taught me that. At this moment Curt's
boy looked as if he might have taken a step toward getting better. Maybe even two. And if I couldn't let that be enough for one night, I had my own problems.

  "You're in tomorrow, right?" I asked.

  "Bright and early, Sarge. We'll do it all again."

  "Then maybe you ought to postpone your thinking and do a little sleeping instead."

  "I guess I can give it a try." He touched my hand briefly. "Thanks, Sandy".

  "No problem."

  "If I was a pisshead about any of it--"

  "You weren't," I said. He had been a pisshead about some of it, but I didn't think he'd been able to help it. And at his age I likely would have been pissier by far. I watched him walk toward the restored Bel Aire his father had left behind, a car of roughly the same vintage as the one in our shed but a good deal less lively. Halfway across the parking lot he paused, looking at Shed B, and I paused with the smoldering stub of my cigarette poised before my lips, watching to see what he'd do.

  He moved on instead of going over. Good. I took a final puff on my delightful tube of death, thought about crushing it on the hottop, and found a place for it in the butt-can instead, where roughly two hundred previous butts had been buried standing up. The others could crush out their smokes on the pavement if they wanted to--Arky would sweep them up without complaint--but it was better if I didn't do that. I was the Sarge, after all, the guy who sat in the big chair.

  I went into the barracks. Stephanie Colucci was in dispatch, drinking a Coke and reading a magazine. She put the Coke down and smoothed her skirt over her knees when she saw me.

  "What's up, sweetheart?" I asked.

  "Nothing much. Communications are clearing up, though not as fast as they usually do after . . . one of those. I've got enough to keep track of things."

  "What things?"

  "9 is responding to a car-fire on the I-87 Exit 9 ramp, Mac says the driver's a salesman headed for Cleveland, lit up like a neon sign and refusing the field sobriety test. 16 with a possible break-in at Statler Ford. Jeff Cutler with vandalism over at Statler Middle School, but he's just assisting, the local police have got that one."

  "That it?"