From a Buick 8 (48 page)

There was no way to tell, and before I could look more closely, Arky had screamed at Steff to help him and I'd been yanked backward with Ned hanging in my arms like a big doll. I saw no more, but one question at least was answered. They'd gone there, all right, Ennis Rafferty and Brian Lippy both. Wherever
there
was.

I got up from the bench and walked over to the shed a final time. And there it was, midnight blue and not quite right, casting a shadow just as if it were sane.
Oil's fine,
the man in the black coat had told Bradley Roach, and then he was gone, leaving behind this weird steel callingcard. At some point, during the last listless lightstorm, the trunk had shut itself again. About a dozen dead bugs lay scattered on the floor. We'd clean them up tomorrow. No sense saving them, or photographing them, or any of that; we no longer bothered. A couple of guys would burn them in the incinerator out back. I would delegate this job. Delegating jobs is also part of what sitting in the big chair is about, and you get to like it. Hand this one the shit and that one the sweets. Can they complain? No. Can they put it on their TS list and hand it to the chaplain? Yes. For all the good it does.

'We'll outwait you,' I said to the thing in the shed. 'We can do that.'

It only sat there on its whitewalls, and far down in my head the pulse whispered: Maybe.

. . .
and maybe not.

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Obituaries are modest, aren't they? Yeah. Shirt always tucked in, skirt kept below the knee.
Died
unexpectedly.
Could be anything from a heart attack while sitting on the jakes to being stabbed by a burglar in the bedroom. Cops mostly know the truth, though. You don't always
want
to know, especially when it's one of your own, but you do. Because most of the time we're the guys who show up first, with our reds lit and the walkie-talkies on our belts crackling out what sounds like so much gibble-gabble to the John Q's. For most folks who
die unexpectedly,
we're the first faces their staring open eyes can't see. When Tony Schoondist told us he was going to retire I remember thinking,
Good, that's good, he's
getting a little long in the tooth. Not to mention a little slow on the uptake.
Now, in the year 2006, I'm getting ready to pull the pin myself and probably some of my younger guys are thinking the same thing: long in the tooth and slow on the draw. But mostly you know I feel the same as I ever did, full of piss and vinegar, ready to work a double shift just about any day of the week. Most days when I note the gray hair which now predominates the black or how much more forehead there is below the place where the hair starts, I think it's a mistake, a clerical error which will eventually be rectified when brought to the attention of the proper authorities. It is impossible, I think, that a man who still feels so profoundly twenty-five can look so happast fifty. Then there'll be a stretch of bad days and I'll know it's no error, just time marching on, that shuffling, rueful tread. But was there ever a moment as bad as seeing Ned behind the wheel of the Buick Roadmaster 8?

Yes. There was one.

Shirley was on duty when the call came in: a crackup out on SR 32, near the Humboldt Road intersection. Where the old Jenny station used to be, in other words. Shirley's face was pale as ashes when she came and stood in the open door of my office.

'What is it?' I asked. 'What the hell's wrong with you?'

'Sandy . . . the man who called it in said the vehicle was an old Chevrolet, red and white. He says the driver's dead.' She swallowed. 'In pieces. That's what he said.'

That part I didn't care about, although I would later, when I had to look at it. At him. 'The Chevrolet have you got the model?'

'I didn't ask. Sandy, I couldn't.' Her eyes were full of tears. 'I didn't dare. But how many old red and white Chevrolets do you think there are in Statler County?'

I went out to the scene with Phil Candleton, praying the crashed Chevy would turn out to be a Malibu or a Biscayne, anything but a Bel Aire, vanity plate MY 57. But that's what it was.

'Fuck,' Phil said in a low and dismayed voice.

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He'd piled it into the side of the cement bridge which spans Redfern Stream less than five minutes'

walk from where the Buick 8 first appeared and where Curtis was killed. The Bel Aire had seatbelts, but he hadn't been wearing one. Nor were there any skidmarks.

'Christ almighty,' Phil said. 'This ain't right.'

Not right and not an accident. Although in the obituary, where shirts are kept neatly tucked in arid skirts are kept dis-creetly below the knee, it would only say he
died unexpectedly,
which was true. Lord yes.

Lookie-loos had started showing up by then, slowing to stare at what lay facedown on the bridge's narrow walkway. I think one asshole actually took a picture. I wanted to run after him and stuff his shitty little disposable camera down his throat.

'Get some detour signs up,' I told Phil. 'You and Carl. Send the traffic around by County Road. I'll cover him up. Jesus, what a mess! Jesus! Who's gonna tell his mother?'

Phil wouldn't look at me. We both knew who was going to tell his mother. Later that day I bit the bullet and did the worst job that comes with the big chair. Afterward I went down to The Country Way with Shirley, Huddie, Phil, and George Stankowski. I don't know about them, but I myself didn't pass go or collect two hundred dollars; old Sandy went directly to shitfaced. I only have two clear memories of that night. The first is of trying to explain to Shirley how weird The Country Way's jukeboxes were, how all the songs were the very ones you never thought of anymore until you saw their names again here. She didn't get it.

My other memory is of going into the bathroom to throw up. After, while I was splashing cold water on my face, I looked at myself in one of the wavery steel mirrors. And I knew for sure that the getting-to-be-old face I saw looking back at me was no mistake. The mistake was believing that the twenty-five-year-old guy who seemed to live in my brain was real. I remembered Huddie shouting
Sandy, grab my hand!
and then the two of us, Ned and I, had spilled out on to the pavement, safe with the rest of them. Thinking of that, I began to cry. Died unexpectedly,that shit is all right for the County
American,
but cops know the truth. We clean up the messes and we always know the truth.

Everyone not on duty went to the funeral, of course. He'd been one of us. When it was over, George Stankowski gave his mother and his two sisters a ride home and I drove back to the barracks with Shirley. I asked her if she was going to the reception - what you call a wake, I guess, if you're Irish - and she shook her head. 'I hate those things.'

So we had a final cigarette out on the smokers' bench, idly watching the young Trooper who was looking in at the Buick. He stood in that same legs-apart, goddam-the-Democrats, didya-hear-the-one-about-the-traveling-salesman pose that we all assumed when we looked into Shed B. The century had changed, but everything else was more or less the same.

'It's so unfair,' Shirley said. 'A young man like that - '

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'What are you talking about?' I asked her. 'Eddie J. was in his late forties, for God's sake . . . maybe even fifty. I think his sisters are both in their sixties. His mother's almost
eighty!'

'You know what I mean. He was too young to do that.'

'So was George Morgan,' I said.

'Was it . . . ?' She nodded toward Shed B.

'I don't think so. Just his life. He made an honest effort to get sober, busted his ass. This was right after he bought Curt's old Bel Aire from Ned. Eddie always liked that car, you know, and Ned couldn't have it at Pitt anyway, not as a freshman. It would've just been sitting there in his driveway - '

' - and Ned needed the money.'

'Going off to college from a single-parent home? Every penny. So when Eddie asked him, he said okay, sure. Eddie paid thirty-five hundred dollars - '

'Thirty-two,' Shirley said with the assurance of one who really knows.

'Thirty-two, thirty-five, whatever. The point is, I think Eddie saw getting it as a new leaf he was supposed to turn over. He quit going to The Tap; I think he started going to AA meetings instead. That was the good part. For Eddie, the good part lasted about two years.'

Across the parking lot, the Trooper who'd been looking into Shed B turned, spotted us, and began walking in our direction. I felt the skin on my arms prickle. In the gray uniform the boy - only he wasn't a boy any longer, not really - looked strikingly like his dead father. Nothing strange about that, I suppose; it's simple genetics, a correspondence that runs in the blood. What made it eerie was the big hat. He had it in his hands and was turning it over and over.

'Eddie fell off the wagon right around the time that one there decided he wasn't cut out for college,' I said.

Ned Wilcox left Pitt and came home to Statler. For a year he'd done Arky's job, Arky by then having retired and moved back to Michigan, where everyone no doubt sounded just like him (a scary thought). When he turned twenty-one, Ned made the application and took the tests. Now, at twenty-two, here he was. Hello, rookie.

Halfway across the parking lot, Curt's boy paused to look back at the shed, still twirling his Stetson in his hands.

'He looks good, doesn't he?' Shirley murmured.

I put on my Old Sarge face - a little aloof, a little disdainful. 'Relatively squared away. Shirley, do you have any idea how much bright red dickens his ma raised when she finally found out what he had in mind?'

Shirley laughed and put out her cigarette. 'She raised more when she found out he was planning to sell his dad's Bel Aire to Eddie Jacubois - at least that's what Ned told me. I mean, c'mon, Sandy, she had to know it was coming.
Had
to. She was married to one, for God's sake. And she probably knew this was
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where he belonged. Eddie, though, -where did
he
belong? Why couldn't he just stop drinking? Once and for all?'

'That's a question for the ages,' I said. 'They say it's a disease, like cancer or diabetes. Maybe they're right.'

Eddie had begun showing up for duty with liquor on his breath, and no one covered for him very long; the situation was too serious. When he refused counseling, and a leave of absence to spend four weeks in the spin-dry facility the PSP favors for their stricken officers, he was given his choice: quit quietly or get fired noisily. Eddie had quit, with about half the retirement package he would have received if he'd managed to hang on to his job for another three years - at the end, the benefits really stack up. And I could understand the outcome no more than Shirley - why
hadn't
he just quit? With that kind of incentive, why hadn't he just said
I'llbe thirsty for three years and then I'll pull the pin and take a bath in it?
I didn't know.

The Tap became Eddie J.'s home away from home. Along with the old Bel Aire, that was. He'd kept it waxed on the outside and spotlessly clean on the inside right up to the day when he'd driven it into a bridge abutment near Redfern Stream at approximately eighty miles an hour. He had plenty of reasons to do it by then - he was not a happy man - but I had to wonder if maybe there weren't a few reasons just a little closer to home. Specifically I had to wonder if he hadn't heard that pulse near the end, that tidal whisper that's like a voice in the middle of your head.

Do
it, Eddie, go on, why not? There's not much else, is there? The rest is pretty well used up.
Just step down a little brisker on the old go-pedal and then twist the wheel to the right. Do it. Go
on. Make a little mischief for your buddies to clean up.

I thought about the night we'd sat out on this same bench, the young man I currently had my eye on four years younger than he was now and listening raptly as Eddie told the tale of stopping Brian Lippy's bigfoot truck. The kid listening as Eddie told about trying to get Lippy's girl to do something about her situation before her boyfriend fucked her up beyond all recognition or maybe killed her. The joke turned out to be on Eddie, of course. So far as I knew, that bloodyface girl is the only one of that roadside quartet still alive. Yeah, she's around. I don't road-patrol much anymore, but her name and picture come across my desk from time to time, each picture showing a woman closer to the beerbreath brokennose fuck-ya-for-a-pack-of-smokes hag she will, barring a miracle, become. She's had lots of DUIs, quite a few D-and-Ds, a trip to the hospital one night with a broken arm and hip after she fell downstairs. I imagine someone like Brian Lippy probably helped her down those stairs, don't you? Because they
do
pick the same kind over and over. She has two or maybe it's three kids in foster care. So yeah, she's around, but is she living? If you say she is, then I have to tell you that maybe George Morgan and Eddie J. had the right idea.

'I'm going to make like a bee and buzz,' Shirley said, getting up. 'Can't take any more hilarity in one day. You doin okay with it?'

'Yeah,' I said.

'Hey, he came back that night, didn't he? There's that.'

She didn't have to be any more specific. I nodded, smiling.

'Eddie was a good guy,' Shirley said. 'Maybe he couldn't leave the booze alone, but he had the kindest heart.'

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Nope,I thought, watching her walk across to Ned, watching them talk a little.
Ithink
you're
the one
with the kindest heart, Shirl.

She gave Ned a little peck on the cheek, putting one hand on his shoulder and going up on her toes to do it, then headed toward her car. Ned came over to where I was sitting. 'You okay?' he asked.