From a Buick 8 (47 page)

'Tins isn't the same.'

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'How do you know it's not? How do you know?'

And the New Sarge, who will later think,It should have been me whose hat wound up lying blood-bolted on the side of the road,
can say nothing. It seems almost profane to disagree with him,
and besides, who knows? He could be right. Kids
do
blow off their fingers with blastingcaps or kill
their little brothers with guns they find in their parents' bureau drawers or burn down the house
with some old sparklight they found out in the garage. Because they don't know what they're
playing with.

'Suppose,' says the man twirling his Stetson between his hands, 'that the 8 is a kind of valve. Like the one in a scuba diver's regulator. Sometimes it breathes in and sometimes it breathes out, giving or receiving according to the will of the user. But what it does it always limited by the valve.'

'Yes, but - '

'Or think of it. another way. Suppose it breathes like a man lying on the bottom of a swamp and using a hollow reed to sip air with so he won't be seen.'

'All right, but - '

'Either way, everything comes in or goes out in small breaths, theymust
be small breaths, because the
channel through which they pass is small. Maybe the thing using the valve or the reed has put
itself into a kind of suspended state, like sleep or hypnosis, so it can survive on so little breath.
And then suppose some misguided fool comes along and throws enough dynamite into the swamp
to drain it and make the reed unnecessary. Or, if you're thinking in terms of a valve, blows it clean
off. Would you want to risk that? Risk giving it all the goddam air it needs?'

'No,' the New Sarge says in a small voice.

Curtis says: 'Once Buck Flanders and Andy Colucci made up their minds to do that very thing.'

'The hell you say!'

'The hell I don't,' Curtis returns evenly. 'Andy said if a couple of State Troopers couldn't get away with a little vehicular arson, they ought to turn in their badges. They even had a plan. They were going to blame it on the paint and the thinner out there in the hutch. Spontaneous combustion,poof,
all gone. And
besides, Buck said, who'd send for the Fire Marshal in the first place? It's just an old shed with
some old beater of a Buick inside it, for Christ's sake.'

The New Sarge can say nothing. He's too amazed.

'I think it may have been talking to them,' Curt says.

'Talking.' He's trying to get the sense of this.'Talking
to them.'

'Yes.' Curt puts his hat-
what they always call the big hat - back on his head and hooks the strap
under his chin the way you wear it in warm weather and adjusts the brim purely by feel. Then, to
his old friend he says: 'Can you say it's never talked to you, Sandy?'

The New Sarge opens his mouth to say of course it hasn't, but the other man's eyes are on him, and
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they are grave. In the end the SC says nothing.

'You can't. Because it does. To you, to me, to all of us. It talked loudest to Huddie on the day that monster came through, but we hear it even when it whispers. Don't we? And it talksall the time.
Even in
its sleep. So it's important not to listen.'

Curt stands up.

'Just to watch. That's our job and I know it now. If it has to breathe through that valve long enough, or that reed, or that whatever-it-is, sooner or later it'll choke. Stifle. Give out. And maybe it won't really mind. Maybe it'll more or less die in its sleep. If no one riles it up, that is. Which mostly means doing no more than staying out of snatching distance. But it also means leaving it alone.'

He starts away, his life running out from under his feet like sand and neither of them knowing, then stops and takes one more look at his old friend. They weren't quite rookies together but they grew into the job together and now it fits both of them as well as it ever will. Once, when drunk, the Old Sarge called law enforcement a case of good men doing bad chores.

'Sandy.'

Sandy gives him a whatnow look.

'My boy is playing Legion ball this year, did I tell you?'

'Only about twenty times.'

'The coach has a little boy, must be about three. And one day last week when I went overtown to pick Ned up, I saw him down on one knee, playing toss with that little hoy in left field. And I fell in love with my kid all over again, Sandy. As strong as when I first held him in my arms, wrapped in a blanket. Isn't that funny?'

Sandy doesn't think it's funny. He thinks it's maybe all the truth the world needs about men.

'The coach had given them their uniforms and Ned had his on and he was down on one knee, tossing underhand to the little boy, and I swear he was the whitest, purest thing any summer sky ever looked down on.' And then he says

NOW:

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Sandy

In the shed there was a sallow flash, so pale it was almost lilac. It was followed by darkness . . . then another flash . . . then more darkness . . . darkness this time unbroken.

'Is it done?' Huddie asked, then answered his own question: 'Yeah, I think it is.'

Ned ignored this. 'What?' he asked me. 'What did he say then?'

'What any man says when things are all right at home,' I told him. 'He said he was a lucky man.'

Steff had gone away to mind her microphone and com-puter screen, but the others were still here. Ned took no notice of any of them. His puffy, red-lidded eyes never left me. 'Did he say anything else?'

'Said you hit two homers against the Rocksburg Railroad the week before, and that you gave him a wave after the second one, while you were coming around third. He liked that, laughed telling me about it. He said you saw the ball better on your worst day than he ever had on his best. He also said you needed to start charging ground balls if you were serious about playing third base.'

The boy looked down and began to struggle. We looked away, all of us, to let him do it in reasonable privacy. At last he said: 'He told me not to be a quitter, but that's what he did with that car. That fucking 8. He quit on it.'

I said, 'He made a choice. There's a difference.'

He sat considering this, then nodded. 'All right.'

Arky said: 'Dis time I'm
really
going home.' But before he went he did something I'll never forget: leaned over and put a kiss on Ned's swollen cheek. I was shocked by the tenderness of it. 'G'night, lad.'

'Goodnight, Arky.'

We watched him drive away in his rattletrap pickup and then Huddie said, 'I'll drive Ned home in his Chevy. Who wants to follow along and bring me back here to get my car?'

'I will,' Eddie said. 'Only I'm waiting outside when you take him in. If Michelle Wilcox goes nuclear, I want to be outside the fallout zone.'

'It'll be okay,' Ned told him. 'I'll say I saw the can on the shelf and picked it up to see what it was and maced my stupid self.'

I liked it. It had the virtue of simplicity. It was exactly the sort of story the boy's father would have told.

Ned sighed. 'Tomorrow bright and early I'll be sitting in the optometrist's chair over in Statler Village,
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that's the downside.'

'Won't hurt you,' Shirley said. She also kissed him, planting hers on the corner of his mouth.

'Goodnight, boys. This time everyone goes and no one comes back.'

'Amen to that,' Huddie said, and we watched her walk away. She was forty-five or so, but there was still plenty to look at when she put her backfield in motion. Even by moonlight.
(Especially
by moonlight.) Off she went, driving past us, a quick flick of right-back-atcha and then nothing but the taillights. Darkness from Shed B. No taillights there. No fireworks, either. It was over for the night and someday it would be over for good. But not yet. I could still feel the sleepy beat of it far down in my mind, a tidal whisper that could be words if you wanted them to be. What I'd seen.

What I'd seen when I had the boy hugged in my arms, him blinded by the spray.

'You want to ride along, Sandy?' Huddie asked.

'Nah, guess not. I'll sit here awhile longer, then get on home. If there are problems with Michelle, you have her call me. Here or at the house, makes no difference.'

'There won't be any problem with Mom,' Ned said.

'What about you?' I asked. 'Are there going to be any more problems with you?'

He hesitated, then said: 'I don't know.'

In some ways I thought it was the best answer he could have given. You had to give him points for hones-ty.

They walked away, Huddie and Ned heading toward the Bel Aire. Eddie split apart from them, going toward his own car and pausing long enough at mine to take the Kojak light off the roof and toss it inside. Ned stopped at the rear bumper of his car and turned back to me. 'Sandy.'

'What is it?'

'Didn't he have any idea at all about where it came from? What it was? Who the man in the black coat was? Didn't
any
of you?'

'No. We blue-skied it from time to time, but no one ever had an idea that felt like the real deal, or even close. Jackie O'Hara probably nailed it when he said the Buick was like a jigsaw piece that won't fit into the puzzle anywhere. You worry it and worry it, you turn it this way and that, try it everywhere, and one day you turn it over and see the back is red and the backs of all the pieces in your puzzle are green. Do you follow that?'

'No,' he said.

'Well, think about it,' I said, 'because you're going to have to live with it.'

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'How am I supposed to
do
that?' There was no anger in his voice. The anger had been burned away. Now all he wanted was instructions. Good.

'You don't know where
you
came from or where you're going, do you?' I asked him. 'But you live with it just the same. Don't rail against it too much. Don't spend more than an hour a day shaking your fists at the sky and cursing God.'

'But - '

'There are Buicks everywhere,' I said.

Steff came out after they were gone and offered me a cup of coffee. I told her thanks, but I'd pass. I asked her if she had a cigarette. She gave me a prim look - almost shocked -and reminded me she didn't smoke. As though that was her toll-booth, one with the sign readingall buick roadmasters must detour beyond this point. Man, if we lived in that world. If only.

'Are you going home?' she asked.

'Shortly.'

She went inside. I sat by myself on the smokers' bench. There were cigarettes in my car, at least half a pack in the glovebox, but getting up seemed like too much work, at least for the moment. When I did get up, I reckoned it would be best just to stay in motion. I could have a smoke on the way home, and a TV

dinner when I got in - The Country Way would be closed by now, and I doubted if Cynthia Garris would be very happy to see my face in the place again soon, anyway. I'd given her a pretty good scare earlier, her fright nothing to mine when the penny finally dropped and I realized what Ned was almost certainly planning to do. And my fear then was only a shadow of the terror I'd felt as I looked into that rising purple glare with the boy hanging blind in my arms and that steady beat-beat-beat in my ears, a sound like approaching footfalls. I had been looking both down, as if into a well, and on an uptilted plane
. . .
as if my vision had been split by some prismatic device. It had been like looking through a periscope lined with lightning. What I saw was very vivid - I'll never forget it - arid fabulously strange. Yellow grass, brownish at the tips, covered a rocky slope that rose before me and then broke off at the edge of a drop. Green-backed beetles bustled

in the grass, and off to one side there grew a clump of those waxy lilies. I hadn't been able to see the bottom of the drop, but I could see the sky. It was terrible engorged purple, packed with clouds and ripe with lightnings. A prehistoric sky. In it, circling in ragged flocks, were flying things. Birds, maybe. Or bats like the one Curt had tried to dissect. They were too far away for me to be sure. And all this happened very quickly, remember. I think there was an ocean at the foot of that drop but don't know why I think it - perhaps only because of the fish that came bursting out of the Buick's trunk that time. Or the smell of salt. Around the Roadmaster there was always that vague, teary smell of salt.

Lying in the yellow grass close to where the bottom of my window (if that's what it was) ended was a silvery ornament on a fine chain: Brian Lippy's swastika. Years of being out in the weather had tarnished it. A little farther off was a cowboy boot, the fancy-stitched kind with the stacked heel. Much of the leather had been overgrown with a blackgray moss that looked like spiderwebs. The boot had been torn down one side, creating a ragged mouth through which I could see a yellow gleam of bone. No flesh; twenty years in the caustic air of that place would have decayed it, though I doubt the absence of flesh
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was due to mere decay alone. What I think is that Eddie J.'s old school pal was eaten. Probably while still alive. And screaming, if he could catch enough breath to do so. And two things more, near the top of my momentary window. The first was a hat, also furry with patches of that blackgray moss; it had grown all around the brim and also in the crease of the crown. It wasn't exactly what we wear now, that hat, the uniform has changed some since the nineteen-seventies, but it was a PSP Stetson, all right. The big hat. It hadn't blown away because someone or something had driven a splintery wooden stake down through it to hold it in place. As if Ennis Rafferty's killer had been afraid of the alien intruder even after the intruder's death, and had staked the most striking item of his clothing to make sure he wouldn't rise and walk the night like a hungry vampire. Near the hat, rusty and almost hidden by scrub grass, was his sidearm. Not the Beretta auto we carry now but the Ruger. The kind George Morgan had used. Had Ennis also used his to commit suicide? Or had he seen something coming, and died firing his weapon at it? Had it even been fired at all?