From a Buick 8 (22 page)

'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 - '

'Yeah, but that one sounded, you know, more adminis-trative 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 . . .'

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

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.'

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

'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.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

'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'nusual, 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
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

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.'

'I love you, Shirley, marry me,' Huddie said. He put an arm around her and puckered his lips. Not a pretty sight, all in all.

She elbowed him. 'You're married already, foolish.'

Eddie J. spoke up then. 'If your dad believed anything, it was that yonder machine came from some other dimension.'

'Another
dimension?
You're kidding.' He looked at Eddie closely. 'No. You're
not
kidding.'

'And he didn't think it was planned at all,' Eddie went on. 'Not, you know, like you'd plan to send a ship across the ocean or a satellite into space. In some ways, I'm not even sure he thought it was real.'

'You lost me,' the kid said.

'Me, too,' Shirley agreed.

'He said . . .' Eddie shifted on the bench. He looked out again at the grassy place where Shed A had once stood. 'This was at the O'Day farm, if you want to know the truth. That day. You hafta realize we were out there almost seven goddam hours, parked in the corn and waiting for those two dirtbagsto come back. Cold. Couldn't run the engine, couldn't run the heater. We talked about everything - hunting, fishing, bowling, our wives, our plans. Curt said he was going to get out of the PSP in another five years '

'He said that?' Ned was round-eyed.

Eddie gave him an indulgent look. 'From time to time we all say that, kid. Just like all the junkies say they're going to quit the spike. I told him how I'd like to open my own security business in The Burg, also how I'd like to get me a brand-new Winnebago. He told me about how he wanted to take some science courses at Horlicks and how he was getting resistance from your mom. She said it was their job to put the
kids
through school, not him. He caught a lot of flak from her but never blamed her. Because she didn't know why he wanted to take those courses, what had got him interested, and he couldn't tell her. That's how we got around to the Buick. And what he said - I remember this clear as the sky on a summer morning - was that we saw it as a Buick because we had to see it as
something.'

'Have to see it as something,' Ned muttered. He was leaning forward and rubbing the center of his forehead with two fingers, like a man with a headache.

'You look as confused as I felt, but I
did
sort of understand what he meant. In here.' Eddie tapped his chest, above his heart.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Ned turned back to me. 'Sandy, that day at the picnic, did any of you talk about . . .' He trailed off without finishing.

'Talk about what?' I asked him.

He shook his head, looked down at the remains of his sandwich, and popped the last bite into his mouth. 'Never mind. Isn't important. Did my dad really dissect the bat-thing you guys found?'

'Yep. After the second lightshow but before the Labor Day picnic. He - '

'Tell the kid about the leaves,' Phil said. 'You forgot that part.'