From a Buick 8 (33 page)

'I know,' Curt said, lowering his voice so the Troopers outside wouldn't hear. 'Hurts just to look, doesn't it? It's the visual equivalent of hearing someone scrape a blackboard with his fingernails.'

Sandy nodded. Hole in one.

'But what triggers that reaction?' Curt asked. 'I can't put my finger on any one thing. Can you?'

'No.' Sandy licked his lips, which had gone dry. 'And I think that's because it's everything together. A lot of it's the white.'

'The white. The color.'

'Yeah. Nasty. Like a toad's belly.'

'Like cobwebs spun into flowers,' Curt said.

They looked at each other for a moment, trying to smile and not doing a very good job of it. State Police poets, Trooper Frost and Trooper Sandburg. Next they'd be comparing the goddam thing to a summer's day. But you had to try doing that, because it seemed you could only grasp what you were seeing by an act of mental reflection that was like poetry.

Other similes, less coherent, were banging and swerving in Sandy's head. White like a communion wafer in a dead woman's mouth. White like a thrush infection under your tongue. White like the foam of creation just beyond the edge of the universe, maybe.

'This stuff comes from a place we can't even begin to comprehend,' Curt said. 'Our senses can't grasp any of it, not really. Talking about it's a joke - you might as well try to describe a four-sided triangle. Look there, Sandy. Do you see?' He pointed the tip of a gloved finger at a dry brown patch just below one of the corpse-lily flowers.

'Yeah, I see it. Looks like a burn.'

'And it's getting bigger. All the spots are. And look there on the flower.' It was another brown patch, spreading as they looked at it, gobbling an ever-widening hole in the flower's fragile white skin. 'That's decomposition. It's not going in quite the same way as the bat and the fish, but it's going, just the same. Isn't it?'

Sandy nodded.

'Pull the garbage bag out of my belt and open it, would you?'

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Sandy did as he was asked. Curt reached into the trunk and grasped the plant just above its rooty bulb. When he did, a fresh whiff of that watery cabbage/spoiled cucumber stench drifted up to them. Sandy took a step back, hand pressed against his mouth, trying not to gag and gagging anyway.

'Hold that bag open, goddammit!' Curt cried in a choked voice. To Sandy he sounded like someone who has just taken a long hit off a primo blunt and wants to hold the smoke down as long as possible.

'Jesus, it feels nasty! Even through the gloves!'

Sandy held the bag open and shook the top. 'Hurry up, then!'

Curt dropped the decaying corpse-lily plant inside, and even the sound it made going down the bag's plastic throat was somehow wrong - like a harsh whispered cry, something being pressed relentlessly between two boards and almost silently choking. None of the similes was right, yet each seemed to flash a momentary light on what was basically unknowable. Sandy Dearborn could not express even to himself how fundamentally revolting and dismaying the corpse-lilies were. Them and all the Buick's miscarried children. If you thought about them too long, the chances were good that you really would go mad. Curt made as if to wipe his gloved hands on his shirt, then thought better of it. He bent into the Buick's trunk instead, and rubbed them briskly on the brown trunk-mat. Then he stripped the gloves off, motioned for Sandy to open the plastic bag again, and threw them inside on top of the corpse-lily. That smell puffed out again and Sandy thought

of once when his mother, eaten up by cancer and with less than a week to live, had belched in his face. His instinctive but feeble effort to block that memory before it could rise fully into his consciousness was useless.

Please don't let me be sick,Sandy thought.
Ok please, no.
Curt checked to make sure the Polaroids he had taken were still tucked into his belt, then slammed the Buick's trunk. 'Let's get out of here, Sandy. What do you say?'

'I say that's the best idea you've had all year.'

Curt winked at him. It was the perfect wiseguy wink, spoiled only by his pallor and the sweat running down his cheeks and forehead. 'Since it's only February, that's not saying much. Come on.'

Fourteen months later, in April of 1985, the Buick threw a lightquake that was brief but extremely vicious - the biggest and brightest since The Year of the Fish. The force of the event mitigated against Curt and Tony's idea that the energy flowing from or through the Roadmaster was dissipating. The brevity of the event, on the other hand, seemed to argue
for
the idea. In the end, it was a case of you pays your money and you takes your choice. Same as it ever was, in other words. Two days after the lightquake, with the temperature in Shed B standing at an even sixty degrees, the Buick's trunk flew open and a red stick came sailing up and out of it, as if driven by a jet of compressed air. Arky Arkanian was actually in the shed when this happened, putting his posthole digger back on its pegs, and it scared the hell out of him. The red stick clunked against one of the shed's overhead beams, came down on the Buick's roof with a bang, then rolled off and landed on the floor. Hello, stranger. The new arrival was about nine inches long, irregular, the thickness of a man's wrist, with a couple of knotholes in one end. It was Andy Colucci, looking in at it through the binoculars five or ten minutes later,
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who determined that the knotholes were eyes, and what looked like grooves or cracks on one side of the thing was actually a leg, perhaps drawn up in its final death-agony. Not a stick, Andy thought, but some kind of red lizard. Like the fish, the bat, and the lily, it was a goner. Tony Schoondist was the one to go in and collect the specimen that time, and that night at The Tap he told several Troopers he could barely bring himself to touch it. 'The goddamned thing was staring at me,'

he said. 'That's what it felt like, anyway. Dead or not.' He poured himself a glass of beer and drank it down at a single draught. 'I hope that's the end of it,' he said. 'I really, really do.'

But of course it wasn't.

THEN:

Shirley

It's funny how little things can mark a day in your mind. That Friday in 1988 was probably the most horrible one in my life - I didn't sleep well for six months after, and I lost twenty-five pounds because for awhile I couldn't eat - but the way I mark it in time is by something nice. That was the day Herb Avery and Justin Islington brought me the bouquet of field-flowers. Just before everything went crazy, that was. They were in my bad books, those two. They'd ruined a brand-new linen skirt, horsing around in the kitchen. I was no part of it, just a gal minding her own business, getting a cup of coffee. Not paying attention, and isn't that mostly when they get you? Men, I mean. They'll be all right for awhile, so you relax, even get lulled into thinking they might be basically

sane after all, and then they just break out. Herb and that Islington came galloping into the kitchen like a couple of horses yelling about some bet. Justin is thumping Herb all around the head and shoulders and hollering
Pay up, you son of a buck, pay up!
and Herb is like
We were just kidding around, you know
I don't bet when I play cards, let hose of me!

But laughing, both of them. Like loons. Justin was half up on Herb's back, hands around his neck, pretending to choke him. Herb was trying to shake him off, neither of them looking at me or even knowing I was there, standing by the Mr Coffee in my brand-new skirt. Just PCO Pasternak, you know

- part of the furniture.

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'Look out, you two galoots!' I yelled, but it was too late. They ran smack into me before I could put my cup down and there went the coffee, all down my front. Getting it on the blouse didn't bother me, it was just an old thing, but the skirt was brand-new. And
nice.
I'd spent half an hour the night before, fixing the hem.

I gave a yell and they finally stopped pushing and thump-ing. Justin still had one leg around Herb's hip and his hands around his neck. Herb was looking at me with his mouth hung wide open. He was a nice enough fellow (about Islington I couldn't say one way or the other; he was transferred over to Troop K in Media before I really got to know him), but with his mouth hung open that way, Herb Avery looked as dumb as a bag of hammers.

'Shirley, oh jeez,' he said. You know, he sounded like Arky, now that I think back, same accent, just not quite as thick. 'I never sar' you dere.'

'I'm not surprised,' I said, 'with that other one trying to ride you like you were a horse in the goddam Kentucky Derby.'

'Are you burned?' Justin asked.

'You bet I'm burned,' I said. 'This skirt was thirty-five dollars at J.C. Penney and it's the first time I wore it to work and it's ruined. You want to believe I'm burned.'

'Jeepers, calm down, we're sorry,' Justin said. He even had the gall to sound offended. And that's also men as I've come to know them, pardon the philosophy. If they say they're sorry, you're supposed to go all mellow, because that takes care of everything. Doesn't matter if they broke a window, blew up the powerboat, or lost the kids' college fund playing blackjack in Atlantic City. It's like
Hey, I
said
Iwas
sorry, do you have to make a federal case of it?

'Shirley - ' Herb started.

'Not now, honeychile, not now,' I said. 'Just get out of here. Right out of my sight.'

Trooper Islington, meanwhile, had grabbed a handful of napkins off the counter and started mopping the front of my skirt.

'Stop that!' I said, grabbing his wrist. 'What do you think this is, Free Feel Friday?'

'I just thought . . . if it hasn't set in yet . . .'

I asked him if his mother had any kids that lived and he started in with
Well Jesus,
(
if
that's
the way you
feel,
all huffy and offended.

'Do yourself a favor,' I said, 'and go right now. Before you end up wearing this goddam coffee pot for a necklace.'

Out they went, more slinking than walking, and for quite awhile afterward they steered wide around me, Herb shamefaced and Justin Islington still wearing that puzzled, offended look -
I
said
Iwas sorry,
what do you want, egg in your beer?

Then, a week later - on the day the shit hit the fan, in other words - they showed up in dispatch at two in the afternoon, Justin first, with the bouquet, and Herb behind him. Almost
hiding
behind him, it looked
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like, in case I should decide to start hucking paperweights at them. Thing is, I'm not much good at holding a grudge. Anyone who knows me will tell you that. I do all right with them for a day or two, and then they just kind of melt through my fingers. And the pair of them looked cute, like little boys who want to apologize to Teacher for cutting up dickens in the back of the room during social studies. That's another thing about men that gets you, how in almost the blink of a damned eye they can go from being loudmouth galoots who cut each other in the bars over the least little thing -
baseball scores,
for the love of God - to sweeties right out of a Norman Rockwell picture. And the next thing you know, they're in your pants or trying to get there. Justin held out the bouquet. It was just stuff they'd picked in the field behind the barracks. Daisies, black-eyed susans, things of that nature. Even a few dandelions, as I recall. But that was part of what made it so cute and disarming. If it had been hothouse roses they'd bought downtown instead of that kid's bouquet, I might have been able to stay mad a little longer. That was a
good
skirt, and I hate hemming the damned things, anyway. Justin Islington out in front because he had those blue-eyed football-player good looks, complete with the one curl of dark hair tumbled over his forehead. Supposed to make me melt, and sort of did. Holding the flowers out. Shucks, oh gorsh, Teacher. There was even a little white envelope stuck in with the flowers.

'Shirley,' Justin said - solemn enough, but with that cute little twinkle in his eyes - 'We want to make up with you.'

'That's right,' Herb said. 'I hate having you mad at us.'

'I do, too,' Justin said. I wasn't so sure that one meant it, but I thought Herb really did, and that was good enough for me.

'Okay,' I said, and took the flowers. 'But if you do it again - '

'We won't!' Herb said. 'No way! Never!' Which is what they all say, of course. And don't accuse me of being a hardass, either. I'm just being realistic.

'If you do, I'll thump you crosseyed.'I cocked an eyebrow at Islington. 'Here's something your mother probably never told you, you being a pointer instead of a setter: sorry won't take a coffee stain out of a linen skirt.'

'Be sure to look in the envelope,' Justin said, still trying to slay me with those bright blue eyes of his. I put the vase down on my desk and plucked the envelope out of the daisies. 'This isn't going to puff sneezing powder in my face or anything like that, is it?' I asked Herb. I was joking, but he shook his head earnestly. Looking at him that way, you had to wonder how he could ever stop anyone and give them a ticket for speeding or reckless driving without getting a ration of grief. But Troopers are different on the highway, of course. They have to be.

I opened the envelope, expecting a little Hallmark card with another version of
I'm sorry on
it, this one written in flowery rhymes, but instead there was a folded piece of paper. I took it out, unfolded it, and saw it was a J.C. Penney gift certificate, made out to me in the amount of fifty dollars.

'Hey, no,' I said. All at once I felt like crying. And while I'm at it, that's the other thing about men -just
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