From a Buick 8 (13 page)

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 asked. '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 CountryWay 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 bet-ween 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.'

'What issue?' Ned asked.

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'Discretion,' Huddie said. 'Cops can keep secrets, but Curt and Tony didn't believe scientists could.

"Look how fast those idiots cropdusted the atomic bomb all around the world," I heard Tony say once.

"We fried the Rosenbergs for it, but anyone with half a brain knows the Russians would have had the bomb in two years, anyway. Why? Because scientists like to chat. That thing we've got out in Shed B

may not be the equivalent of the A-bomb, but then again it might. One thing's for sure, it isn't
anybody's
A-bomb as long as it's sitting out back under a piece of canvas."'

I thought Huddie was helping the kid understand, but I knew it was just part of the truth, not the whole truth. I've wondered from time to time if Tony and Ned's father ever really needed to talk about it - I mean on some late weekday evening when things at the barracks were at their slowest, guys cooping upstairs, other guys watching a movie on the VCR and eating microwave popcorn, just the two of them downstairs from all that, in Tony's office with the door shut. I'm not talking about maybe or kinda or sorta. I mean whether or not they ever spoke the flat-out truth:
There's not anything like this anywhere,
and we're keeping it.
I don't think so. Because really, all they would have needed to do was to look into each other's eyes. To see that same eagerness - the desire to touch it and pry into it. Hell, just to walk around it. It was a secret thing, a mystery, a marvel. But I didn't know if the boy could accept that. I knew he wasn't just missing his father; he was angry at him for dying. In that mood, he might have seen what they did as stealing, and that wasn't truth, either. At least not the whole truth.

'By then we knew about the lightquakes,' I said. 'Tony called them "dispersal events". He thought the Buick was getting rid of something, discharging it like static electricity. Issues of discretion and caretaking aside, by the end of the seventies people in Pennsylvania - and not just us but everyone - had one very big reason not to trust the scientists and the techies.'

'Three-Mile,' Ned said.

'Yes. Plus, there's more to that car than self-healing scratches and dust-repellent. Quite a bit more.'

I stopped. It seemed too hard too much.

'Go on, tell him,' Arky said. He sounded almost angry, a pissed-off bandleader in the gloaming. 'You told him all dis dat don't mean shit, now you tell im da rest.' He looked at Huddie, then Shirley. 'Even 1988. Yeah, even dat part.' He paused, sighed, looked at Shed B. 'Too late to stop now, Sarge.'

I got up and started across the parking lot. Behind me, I heard Phil say: 'No, hunh-unh. Let him go, kid, he'll be back.'

That's one thing about sitting in the big chair; people can say that and almost always be right. Barring strokes, heart attacks, and drunk drivers, I guess. Barring acts of what we mortals hope is God. People who sit in the big chair - who have worked to get there and work to stay there - never just say oh fuck it and go fishing. No. Us big-chair folks continue making the beds, washing the dishes, and baling the hay, doing it the best we can.
Ah, man, what would we do without you?
people say. The answer is that most of them would go on doing whatever the hell they want, same as always. Going to hell in the same old handbasket.

I stood at the roll-up door of Shed B, looking through one of the windows at the thermometer. It was down to fifty-two. Still not bad - not
terrible,
anyway - but cold enough for me to think the Buick was going to give another shake or two before settling down for the night. No sense spreading the tarp back over it yet, then; we'd likely just have to do it again later on.
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It's winding down:that was the received wisdom concern-ing the Roadmaster, the gospel according to Schoondist and Wilcox. Slowing like an unwound clock, wobbling like an exhausted top, beeping like a smoke detector that can no longer tell what's hot. Pick your favorite metaphor from the bargain bin. And maybe it was true. Then again, maybe it wasn't. We knew nothing about it, not really. Telling ourselves we did was just a strategy we used so we could continue living next door to it without too many bad dreams.

I walked back to the bench, lighting another cigarette, and sat down between Shirley and Ned. I said,

'Do you want to hear about the first time we saw what we saw tonight?'

'Yes, sir. I sure do.'

The eagerness I saw on his face made it a little easier to go on.

Sandy was there when it started, the only one who was. In later years he would say - half-joking - that it was his one claim to fame. The others arrived on the scene soon enough, but to begin with it was only Sander Freemont Dearborn, standing by the gas-pump with his mouth hung open and his eyes squinched shut, sure that in another few seconds the whole bunch of them, not to mention the Amish and few non-Amish farmers in the area, would be so much radioactive dust in the wind. It happened a couple of weeks after the Buick came into Troop D's possession, around the first of August in the year 1979. By then the newspaper coverage of Ennis Rafferty's disappearance was dying down. Most of the stories about the missing State Trooper appeared in the Statler
County American,
but the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette
ran a feature piece on the front page of its Sunday edition at the end of July.
MISSING TROOPER'S SISTER LEFT WITH MANY QUESTIONS,
the headline read, and beneath that: EDITH HYAMS CALLS FOR FULL INVESTIGATION.

Overall, the story played out exactly as Tony Schoondist had hoped it would. Edith believed the men in Troop D knew more than they were telling about her brother's disappearance; she was quoted on that
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in both papers. What was left between the lines was that the poor woman was half out of her mind with grief (not to mention anger), and looking for someone to blame for what might have been her own fault. None of the Troopers said anything about her sharp tongue and nearly constant fault-finding, but Ennis and Edith had neighbors who weren't so discreet. The reporters from both papers also mentioned that, accusations or no, the men in Ennis's Troop were going ahead with plans to provide the woman with some modest financial support.

The harsh black-and-white photo of Edith in the
Post-Gazette
didn't help her case; it made her look like Lizzie Borden about fifteen minutes before she grabbed her hatchet.

The first lightquake happened at dusk. Sandy had come off patrol around six that evening in order to have a little chat with Mike Sanders, the County Attorney. They had a particularly nasty hit-and-run trial coming up, Sandy the prime witness for the prosecution, the victim a child who had been left a quadriplegic. Mike wanted to be very sure that the coke-snorting Mr Businessman responsible went away. Five years was his goal, but ten wasn't out of the question. Tony Schoondist sat in on part of the meeting, which took place in a corner of the upstairs common room, then went down to his office while Mike and Sandy finished up. When the meeting was over, Sandy decided to top up the tank in his cruiser before hitting the road for another three hours or so.

As he walked past dispatch toward the back door, he heard Matt Babicki say in a low, just-talking-to-myself voice: 'Oh you fucking thing.' This was followed by a whack. 'Why don't you
behave?'

Sandy peeped around the corner and asked if Matt was having that delicate time of the month. Matt wasn't amused. 'Listen to this,' he said, and boosted the gain on his radio. Thesquelch knob, Sandy saw, was already turned as far as it would go toward +.

Brian Cole checked in from Unit 7, Herb Avery from 5 out on the Sawmill Road, George Stankowski from Godknew where. That one was almost entirely lost in a windy burst of static.

'If this gets any worse, I don't know how I'm going to keep track of the guys, let alone shoot them any information,' Matt complained. He slapped the side of his radio again, as if for emphasis. 'And what if someone calls in with a complaint? Is it getting ready to thunderstorm outside, Sandy?'

'It "was clear as a bell when I came in,' he said, then looked out the window. 'Clear as a bell now, too

. . . as you could see, if your neck had a swivel in it. I was born with one, see?' Sandy turned his head from side to side.

'Very funny. Haven't you got an innocent man to frame, or something?'

'Good one, Matt. That's a very snappy comeback.'

As he went on his way, Sandy heard someone upstairs wanting to know if the damned TV antenna had fallen down, because the picture had all of a sudden gone to hell during a pretty good
Star Trek
rerun, the one about the Tribbles.

Sandy went out. It was a hot, hazy evening with thunder rumbling off in the distance but no wind and a clear sky overhead. The light was starting to drain away into the west, and a groundmist was rising from
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the grass; it had gotten to a height of maybe five feet.

He got in his cruiser (D-14 that shift, the one with the busted headrest), drove it across to the Amoco pump, got out, unscrewed the gas cap under the pull-down license plate, then stopped. He had suddenly become aware of how quiet it was - no crickets chirring in the grass, no birds singing anywhere around. The only noise was a low, steady humming, like the sound one hears if one is standing right under the county powerlines, or near an electrical substa-tion.

Sandy started to turn around, and as he did, the whole world went purple-white. His first thought was that, clear sky overhead or no, he had been struck by lightning. Then he saw Shed B lit up like . . .
But there
was no way to finish the metaphor. There
was
nothing like it, not in his experience. If he had been looking at those first few flashes dead on, he guessed he would have been blinded maybe temporarily, maybe for good. Luckily for him, the shed's front roll-up door faced away from the gas-pump. Yet still the glare was enough to dazzle his eyes, and to turn that summer twilight as bright as noonday.
And
it made Shed B, a solid enough wooden structure, seem as insubstantial as a tent made out of gauze. Light shot through every crack and unoccupied nail-hole; it flashed out from beneath the eaves through a small cavity that might have been gnawed by a squirrel; it blazed at ground-level, where a board had fallen off, in a great brilliant bar. There was a ventilator stack on the roof, and it shot the glare skyward in irregular bursts, like smoke-signals made out of pure violet light. The flashes through the rows of windows on the roll-up doors, front and back, turned the rising groundmist into an eerie electric vapor. Sandy was calm. Startled, but calm. He thought:
This is it, motherfucker's blowing, we're all dead.
The thought of running or jumping into his cruiser never entered his head. R.unwhere? Drive where? It was a joke.