From a Buick 8 (49 page)

'Yeah, good.'

'And the funeral . . . ?'

'Hey, shit, it was a funeral. I've been to better and I've been to worse. I'm glad the coffin was closed.'

'Sandy, can I show you something? Over there?' He nodded his head at Shed B.

'Sure.' I got up. 'Is the temperature going down?' If so, it was news. It had been two years since the temp in there had dropped more than five degrees below the outside temperature. Sixteen months since the last lightshow, and that one had consisted of no more than eight or nine pallid flickers.

'No,' he said.

'Trunk open?'

'Shut tight as a drum.'

'What, then?'

'I'd rather show you.'

I glanced at him sharply, for the first time getting out of my own head enough to register how excited he was. Then, with decidedly mixed feelings - curiosity and apprehension were the dominant chords, I guess-I walked across the parking lot with my old friend's son. He took up his sidewalk super's pose at one window and I took up mine at the next.

At first I saw nothing unusual; the Buick sat on the concrete as it had for a quarter of a century, give or take. There were no flashing lights, no exotic exhibits. The thermometer's red needle stood at an unremarkable seventy-three degrees.

'So?' I asked.

Ned laughed, delighted. 'You're looking spang at it and don't see it! Perfect! I didn't see it myself, at first. I knew something had changed, but I couldn't tell what.'

'What are you talking about?'

He shook his head, still smiling. 'Nossir, Sergeant, nossir. I think not. You're the boss; you're also one of just three cops who were there then and are still here now. It's right in front of you, so go to it.'

I looked in again, first squinting and then raising my hands to the sides of my face to block the glare, that old gesture. It helped, but what was I seeing? Something, yes, he was right about that, but just what?

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What had changed?

I remembered that night at The Country Way, nipping the pages of the dead jukebox back and forth, trying to isolate the most important question, which was the one Ned had decided not to ask. It had almost come, then had slipped shyly away again. When that happened, it was no good to chase. I'd thought that then and still did now.

So instead of continuing to give the 8 my cop stare, I unfocused my eyes and let my mind drift away. What it drifted to were song-titles, of course, titles of the ones they never seem to play, even on the oldies stations, once their brief season of popularity has gone. 'Society's Child' and 'Pictures of Matchstick Men' and 'Quick Joey Small' and -and bingo, there it was. Like he'd said, it was right in front of me. For a moment I couldn't breathe. There was a crack in the windshield.

A thin silver lightning-bolt jigjagging top to bottom on the driver's side. Ned clapped me on the shoulder. 'There you go, Sherlock, I knew you'd get there. After all, it's only right there in front of you.'

I turned to him, started to talk, then turned back to make sure I'd seen what I thought I'd seen. I had. The crack looked like a frozen stroke of quicksilver.

'When did it happen?' I asked him. 'Do you know?'

'I take a fresh Polaroid of it every forty-eight hours or so,' he said. 'I'll check to make sure, but I'll bet you a dead cat and a string to swing it with that the last picture I took doesn't show a crack. So this happened between Wednesday evening and Friday afternoon at . . .' He checked his watch, then gave me a big smile. 'At four-fifteen.'

'Might even have happened while we were at Eddie's funeral,' I said.

'Possible, yeah.'

We looked in again for a little while, neither of us talking. Then Ned said, 'I read the poem you told me about. "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay."'

'Did you?'

'Uh-huh. It's pretty good. Pretty funny.'

I stepped back from the window and looked at him.

'It'll happen fast now, like in the poem,' he said. 'Next thing a tire'll blow
. . .
or the muffler will fall off. .

. or a piece of the chrome. You know how you can stand on a frozen lake in January and listen to the ice creak and thunk?'

I nodded.

'This is going to be like that.' His eyes were alight, and a curious idea came to me: I was seeing Ned
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Wilcox really, genuinely happy for the first time since his father had died.

'You think?'

'Yes. Only instead of ice creaking, the sound will be snapping bolts and cracking glass. Cops will line up at these windows like they did in the old days . . . only now it'll be to watch things break and come loose and fall off. Until, finally, the -whole thing goes. They'll wonder if there isn't going to be one more flash of light at the very end, like the final

Chinese Flower at the end of the fireworks display on the Fourth of July.'

'Will there be, do you think?'

'I think the fireworks are over. I think we're going to hear one last big steel clank and then you can take the pieces to the crusher.'

'Are you sure?'

'Nah,' he said, and smiled. 'You
can't
be sure. I learned that from you and Shirley and Phil and Arky and Huddie.' He paused. 'And Eddie J. But I'll watch. And sooner or later . . .' He raised one hand, looked at it, then closed it into a fist and turned back to his window. 'Sooner or later.'

I turned back to my own window, cupping my hands to the sides of my face to cut the glare. I peered in at the thing that looked like a Buick Roadmaster 8. The kid was absolutely right.

Sooner or later.

Bangor, Maine

Boston, Massachusetts

Naples, Florida

Lovell, Maine

3 April, 1999-11 May, 2001

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I've had ideas fall into my lap from time to time - I suppose this is true of any writer - but
From a Buick
8
was almost comically the reverse: a case of me falling into the lap of an idea. That's worth a note, I think, especially when it leads to an important acknowledgment.

My wife and I spent the winter of 1999 on Longboat Key in Florida, where I tinkered at the final draft of a short novel
(The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon)
and wrote little else of note. Not did I have plans to write anything in the spring of that year.

In late March, Tabby flew back to Maine from Florida. I drove. I hate to fly, love to drive, and besides, I had a truckload of furnishings, books, guitars, computer components, clothes, and paper to transport. My second or third day on the road found me in western Pennsylvania. I needed gas and got off I-87 at a rural exit. At the foot of the ramp I found a Conoco (not a Jenny) station. There was an actual attendant who actually pumped the gas. He even threw in a few words of tolerably pleasant conversation at no extra charge.

I left him doing his thing and went to the restroom to do mine. When I finished, I walked around to the back of the station. Here I found a rather steep slope littered with auto parts and a brawling stream at the foot. There was still a fair amount of snow on the ground, in dirty strips and runners. I walked a little way down the slope to get a better look at the water, and my feet went out from beneath me. I slid about ten feet before grabbing a rusty truck axle and bringing myself to a stop. Had I missed it, I might well have gone into the water. And then? All bets are off, as they say.

I paid the attendant (so far as I know, he had no idea of my misadventure) and got back on the highway. I mused about my slip as I drove, wondering about what would have happened if I'd gone into the stream (which, with all that spring runoff, was at least temporarily a small river). How long would my truckload of Florida furnishings and our bright Florida clothes have stood at the pumps before the gas-jockey got nervous? Who would he have called? How long before they'd have found me, had I drowned?

This little incident happened around ten in the morning. By afternoon I was in New York. And by then I had the story you've just read pretty much set in my mind. I have said before that first drafts are only about story; if there is meaning, it should come later, and arise naturally from the tale itself. This story became - I suppose - a meditation on the essentially indecipherable quality of life's events, and how impossible it is to find a coherent meaning in those events. The first draft was written in two months. By then I realized I had made myself a whole host of problems by writing of two things I knew nothing about: western Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania State Police. Before I could address either of these concerns, I suffered my own road-accident and my life changed radically. I came out of the summer of

'99 lucky to have any life at all, in fact. It was over a year before I even thought of this story again, let alone worked on it.

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The coincidence of having written a book filled with grisly vehicular mishaps shortly before suffering my own has not been lost on me, but I've tried not to make too much of it. Certainly I don't think there was anything premonitory about the similarities between what happens to Curtis Wilcox in
Buick 8
and what happened to me in real life (for one thing, I lived). I can testify at first hand, however, that I got most of it right from imagination: as with Curtis, the coins were stripped from my pockets and the watch from my wrist. The cap I was wearing was later found in the woods, at least twenty yards from the point of impact. But I changed nothing in the course of my story to reflect what happened to me; most of what I wanted was there in the completed draft. The imagination is a powerful tool. It never crossed my mind to re-set
From a Buick 8
in Maine, although Maine is the place I know (and love) the best. I stopped at a gas station in Pennsylvania, went on my ass in Pennsylvania, got the idea in Pennsylvania. I thought the resulting tale should stay in Pennsylvania, in spite of the aggravations that presented. Not that there weren't rewards, as well; for one thing, I got to set my fictional town of Statler just down the road apiece from Rocksburg, the town which serves as the locale for K.C. Constantine's brilliant series of novels about small-town police chief Mario Balzic. If you've never read any of these stories, you ought to do yourself a favor. The continuing story of Chief Balzic and his family is like
The
Sopranos
turned inside-out and told from a law enforcement point of view. Also, western Pennsylvania is the home of the Amish, whose "way of life I wanted to explore a little more fully. This book could never have been finished without the help of Trooper Lucien Southard of the Pennsylvania State Police. Lou read the manuscript, managed not to laugh too hard at its many howlers, and wrote me eight pages of notes and corrections that could be printed in any writer's handbook without a blush (for one thing, Trooper Southard has been taught to print in large, easy-to-read block letters). He took me to several PSP barracks, introduced me to three PCOs who were kind enough to show me what they do and how they do it (to begin with they ran the license plate of my Dodge pickup - it came back clean, I'm relieved to say, with no wants or warrants), and demonstrated all sorts of State Police equipment.

More importantly, Lou and some of his mates took me to lunch at a restaurant in Amish country, where we consumed huge sandwiches and drank pitchers of iced tea, and where they regaled me with stories of Trooper life. Some of these were funny, some of them were horrible, and some managed to be both at the same time. Not all of these tales made it into
Buick 8,
but a number of them did, in suitably fictionalized form. I was treated kindly, and no one moved too fast, which was good. At that time, I was still hopping along on one crutch.

Thanks, Lou - and thanks to all the Troopers who work out of the Butler barracks - for helping me keep my Pennsylvania book in Pennsylvania. Much more important, thanks for helping me understand exactly what it is that State Troopers do.

And the price they pay to do it well.