From a Buick 8

'D, no!' Huddie shouted from the back stoop. Shirley was standing right beside him, her hand up to shade her eyes. 'Stop it, D, you mind me, now!'

Mister D paid zero attention to them. I don't think he would have paid any attention to Orville Garrett, had Orville been there that day, and Orv was the closest thing to an alpha male that D had. He threw himself into the roll-up door again arid again, barking crazily, uttering another of those awful frustrated screams each time he struck the solid surface. The third time he did it, he left a bloody noseprint on the white-painted wood.

During all of this, my old pal Brian was yelling his foolish head off. 'Help me, Jacubois, I'be bleedin like a stuck fuggin pig, where'd your dumbdick friend learn to drive, Sears and fuckin Roebuck? Ged me outta here, my fuggin dose!'

I ignored him and got out of the cruiser, meaning to ask George if he thought D might be rabid, but before I could open my mouth the stink hit me: that smell of seawater and old cabbage and something else, something a whole lot worse.

Mister D suddenly turned and raced to his right, toward the corner of the shed.

'No, D, no!' Shirley screamed. She saw what I saw a second after her - the door on the side, the one you opened with a regular knob instead of rolling up on tracks, was standing a few inches open. I have no idea if someone - Arky, maybe - left it that way NOW:

Arky

It wasn't me, I always close dat door. If I forgot, old Sarge woulda torn me a new asshole. Maybe Curt, too. Dey wanted dat place closed up tight.

Dey was strong on dat.

THEN:

Eddie

or maybe something from inside opened it. Some force originating in the Buick, I suppose that's what I'm talking about. I don't know if that's the case or not; I only know that the door was open. That was where the worst of the stench was coming from, and that was where Mister Dillon was going.

Shirley ran down the steps, Huddie right behind her, both of them yelling for Mister D to come back. They passed us. George ran after them, and I ran after George.

There had been a lightshow from the Buick two or three days before. I hadn't been there, but someone had told me about it, and the temperature had been down in Shed B for almost a week. Not a lot, only four or five degrees. There were a few signs, in other words, but nothing really spectacular. Nothing you'd get up in the middle of the night and write home to mother about.

Nothing that would have led us to suspect what we found when we got inside.

Shirley was first, screaming D's name . . . and then just screaming. A second later arid Huddie was screaming, too. Mister Dillon was barking in a lower register by then, only it was barking and growling all mixed together. It's the sound a dog makes when he's got something treed or at bay. George Morgan yelled out, 'Oh my Lord! Oh my dear Jesus Christ! What is it?'

I went into the shed, but not very far. Shirley and Huddie were standing shoulder to shoulder and George was right behind them. They had the way pretty well blocked up. The smell was rank - it made your eyes water and your throat close - but I hardly noticed it.

The Buick's trunk was open again. Beyond the car, in the far corner of the shed, stood a thin and wrinkled yellow nightmare with a head that wasn't really a head at all but a loose tangle of pink cords, all of them twitching and squirming. Under them you could see more of the yellow, wrinkled flesh. It was very tall, seven feet at least. Some of those pink cords lashed at one of the overhead beams as it stood there. The sound they made was fluttery, like moths striking window-glass at night, trying to get at the light they see or sense behind it. I can still hear that sound. Sometimes I hear it in my dreams.

Within the thicket made by those wavering, convulsing pink things, something kept opening and closing in the yellow flesh. Something black and round. It might have been a mouth. It might have been trying to scream. I can't describe what it was standing on. It's like my brain couldn't make any sense of what my eyes were seeing. Not legs, I'm sure of that much, and I think there might have been three instead of two. They ended in black, curved talons. The talons had bunches of wiry hair growing out of them - I think it was hair, and I think there were bugs hopping in the tufts, little bugs like nits or fleas. From the thing's chest there hung a twitching gray hose of flesh covered with shiny black circles of flesh. Maybe they were blisters. Or maybe, God help me, those things were its eyes.

Standing in front of it, barking and snarling and spraying curds of foam from his muzzle, was our dog. He made as if to lunge forward and the thing shrieked at him from the black hole. The gray hose twitched like a boneless ami or a frog's leg when you shoot electricity into it. Drops of something flew from the end and hit the shed's floor. Smoke began to rise from those spots at once, and I could see them eating into the concrete.

Mister D drew back a little when it shrieked at him but kept on barking and snarling, ears laid back against his skull, eyes bulging out of their sockets. It shrieked again. Shirley screamed and put her hands over her ears. I could understand the urge to do that, but I didn't think it would help much. The shrieks didn't seem to go into your head through your ears but rather just the other way around: they seemed to start in your head and then go out through your ears, escaping like steam. I felt like telling Shirley not to do that, not to block her ears, she'd give herself an embolism or something if she held that awful shrieking inside, and then she dropped her hands on her own.

Huddie put his arm around Shirley and she

THEN:

Shirley

I felt Huddie put his arm around me and I took his hand. I had to. I had to have something human to hold on to. The way Eddie tells it, the Buick's first livebirth sounds too close to human: it had a mouth inside all those writhing pink things, it had a chest, it had something that served it for eyes. I'm not saying any of that's wrong, but I can't say it's right, either. I'm not sure we ever saw it at all, certainly not the way police officers are trained to look and see. That thing was too strange, too far outside not just our experience but our combined frame of reference. Was it humanoid? A little - at least we perceived it that way. Was it human'? Not in the least, don't you believe it. Was it intelligent, aware? There's no way to tell for sure, but yes, I think it probably was. Not that it mattered. We were more than horrified by its strangeness. Beyond the horror (or perhaps inside it is what I mean, like a nut inside a shell) there was hate. Part of me wanted to bark and snarl at it just as Mister Dillon was. It woke an anger in me, an enmity, as well as fright and revulsion. The other things had been dead on arrival. This one wasn't, but we wanted it dead. Oh boy, did we want it dead!

The second time it shrieked, it seemed to be looking right at us. The hose in its middle lifted like an outstretched arm that's perhaps trying to signal Help me, call this barking monstrosity off.

Mister Dillon lunged again. The thing in the corner shrieked a third time and drew back. More liquid splattered from its trunk or arm or penis or whatever it was. A couple of drops struck D

and his fur began to smoke at once. He gave a series of hurt, yipping cries. Then, instead of backing off, he leaped at the thing in the corner.

It moved with eerie, gliding speed. Mister Dillon snatched his teeth into one fold of its wrinkled, baggy skin and then it was gone, lurching along the wall on the far side of the Buick, shrieking from that hole in its yellow skin, the hose wagging back and forth. Black goop, like the stuff that had come out of the bat and the fish, was dribbling from where D had nicked it.

It struck the roll-up door and screeched in pain or frustration or both. And then Mister Dillon was on it from behind. He leaped up and seized it by the loose folds hanging from what I suppose you'd call its back. The flesh tore with sickening ease. Mister Dillon dropped to the shed floor with his jaws clenched. More of the thing's skin tore loose and unrolled like loose wallpaper. Black slime . . . blood . . . whatever it was . . . poured over D's upturned face. He howled at the touch of it but held on to what he had, even shaking his head from side to side to tear more of it loose, shaking his head the way a terrier does when it has hold of a rat.

The thing screamed and then made a gibbering sound that was almost words. And yes, the screams and the wordlike sounds all seemed to start in the middle of your head, almost to hatch there. The thing beat at the roll-up door with its trunk, as if demanding to be let out, but there was no strength in it.

Huddie had drawn his gun. He had a momentarily clear shot at the pink threads and the yellow knob under them, but then the thing whirled around, still wailing out of that black hole beneath the pink weeds, and it fell on top of Mister D. The gray thing growing from its chest -wrapped itself around D's throat and D began to yip arid howl with pain. I saw smoke starting to rise up from where the thing had him, and a moment later I could smell burning fur as well as rotting vegetables and seawater. The intruder was sprawled on top of our dog, squealing and thrashing, its legs (if they were legs) thumping against the roll-up door and leaving smudges that looked like nicotine stains. And Mister Dillon let out howl after long, agonized howl.

Huddle leveled his gun. I grabbed his wrist and forced it down. 'No! You'll hit D!' And then Eddie shoved past me, almost knocking me down. He'd found a pair of rubber gloves on some bags by the door and snapped them on.

THEN:

Eddie

You have to understand that I don't remember any of this the way people ordinarily remember things. For me this is more like remembering the bitter end of a bad drunk. It wasn't Eddie Jacubois who took that pair of rubber gloves from the pile of them on top of the lawn-food bags by the door. It was someone dreaming that he was Eddie Jacubois. That's how it seems now, anyway. I think it seemed that way them.

Was Mister Dillon on my mind? Kid, I'd like to think so. And that's the best I can say.

Because I can't really remember. I think it's more likely that I just wanted to shut that shrieking yellow thing up, get it out of the middle of my head. I hated it in there. Loathed it.

Having it in there was like being raped.

But I must have been thinking, you know it? On some level I really must have been, because I put the rubber gloves on before I took the pickaxe down from the wall. I remember the gloves were blue. There were at least a dozen pairs stacked on those bags, all the colors of the rainbow, but the ones I took were blue. I put them on fast - as fast as the doctors on that ER show. Then I took the pickaxe off its pegs. I pushed past Shirley so hard I almost knocked her down. I would have knocked her down, I think, only Huddie grabbed her before she could fall.

George shouted something. I think it was 'Be careful of the acid'. I don't remember feeling scared and I certainly don't remember feeling brave. I remember feeling outrage and revulsion. It was the way you'd feel if you woke up with a leech in your mouth, sucking the blood out of your tongue. I said that once to Curtis and he used a phrase I never forgot: the horror of trespass.

That's what it was, the horror of trespass.

Mister D, howling and thrashing and snarling, trying to get away; the thing lying on him, the pink threads growing out of its top thrashing around like kelp in a wave; the smell of burning fur; the stench of salt and cabbage; the black stuff pouring out of the thing's dog-bit, furrowed back, running down the wrinkles in its yellow skin like sludge and then pattering on the floor; my need to kill it, erase it, make it gone from the world: all these things were whirling in my mind -

whirling, I tell you, as if the shock of what we'd found in Shed 13 had whipped my brains, pureed them and then stirred them into a cyclone that had nothing to do with sanity or lunacy or police work or vigilante work or Eddie Jacubois. Like I say, I remember it, but not the way you remember ordinary things. More like a dream. And I'm glad. To remember it at all is bad enough. And you can't not remember. Even drinking doesn't stop that, only pushes it away a little bit, and when you stop, it all comes rushing back. Like waking up with a bloodsucker in your mouth.

I got to it and I swung the pickaxe and the pointed end of it went into the middle of it.

Black gunk came out, and I remember thinking of the theme-song from The Beverly Hillbillies, that line that goes 'Up from the ground came a-bubblin crude'.

The thing screamed and threw itself backward against the roll-up door. Mister Dillon got loose and backed away, creeping with his belly low to the floor. He was barking with anger and howling with pain, the sounds mixed together. There was a charred trench in his fur behind his collar.

Half his muzzle had been singed black, as if he'd stuck it in a campfire. Little tendrils of smoke were rising from it.

The thing lying against the roll-up door lifted that gray hose in its chest and those were eyes embedded in it, all right.

They were looking at me and I couldn't bear it. I turned the pickaxe in my hands and brought the axe side of it down. There was a thick chumping sound, and part of the hose rolled away on the concrete. I'd also caved in the chest area. Clouds of stuff like pink shaving cream came out of the hole, billowing, like it was under pressure. Along the length of the gray trunk - the severed piece is what I'm talking about - those eyes rolled spastically, seeming to look in all different directions at once. Clear drops of liquid, its venom, I guess, dribbed out and scorched the concrete.

Then George was beside me. He had a shovel. He drove the blade of it down into the middle of the tendrils on the creature's head. Buried it in the thing's yellow flesh all the way up to the ashwood shaft. The thing screamed. I heard it so loud in my mind that it seemed to push my eyes out in their sockets, the way a frog's eyes will bulge when you wrap your hand around its flabby body and squeeze.

THEN:

Huddie

I put on a pair of gloves myself and grabbed one of the other tools - I think it was a hard rake, but I'm not entirely sure. Whatever it was, I grabbed it, then joined Eddie and George. A few seconds later (or maybe it was a minute, I don't know, time stopped meaning anything) I looked around and Shirley was there, too. She'd put on her own pair of gloves, then grabbed Arky's posthole digger. Her hair had come loose and was hanging down all around her face. She looked to me like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

We all remembered to put on gloves, but we were all crazy. Completely nuts. The look of it, the gibbering keening screeching sound of it, even the way Mister D was howling and whining - all of that made us crazy. I'd forgotten about the overturned tanker, and George Stankowski trying to get the kids into the schoolbus and drive them to safety, and the angry young man Eddie and George Morgan had brought in. I think I forgot there was any world at all outside that stinking little shed. I was screaming as I swung the rake, plunging the tines into the thing on the floor again and again and again. The others were screaming, too. We stood around it in a circle, beating and bludgeoning and cutting it to pieces; we were screaming at it to die and it wouldn't die, it seemed as if it would never die.

If I could forget anything, any part of it, I'd forget this: at the very end, just before it did die, it raised the stump of the thing in its chest. The stump was trembling like an old man's hand. There were eyes in the stump, some of them hanging from shiny threads of gristle by then.

Maybe those threads were optic nerves. I don't know. Anyway, the stump rose up and for just a moment, in the center of my head, I saw myself. I saw all of us standing around in a circle and looking down, looking like murderers at the grave of their victim, and I saw how strange and alien we were. How horrible we were. In that moment I felt its awful confusion. Not its fear, because it wasn't afraid. Not its innocence, because it wasn't innocent. Or guilty, for that matter. What it was was confused. Did it know where it was? I don't think so. Did it know why Mister Dillon had attacked it and we were killing it? Yes, it knew that much. We were doing it because we were so different, so different and so horrible that its many eyes could hardly see us, could hardly hold on to our images as we surrounded it screaming and chopping and cutting and hitting. And then it finally stopped moving. The stub of the trunk-thing in its chest dropped back down again. The eyes stopped twitching and just stared.

We stood there, Eddie and George side by side, panting. Shirley and I were across from them -

on the other side of that thing - and Mister D was behind us, panting and whining. Shirley dropped the posthole digger and when it hit the concrete, I saw a plug of the dead thing's yellow flesh caught in it like a piece of diseased dirt. Her face was bone-white except for two wild bright patches of red in her cheeks and another blooming on her throat like a birthmark.

'Huddie,' she whispered.

'What?' I asked. I could hardly talk, my throat was that dry.

'Huddie!'

' What, goddammit?'

'It could think,' she whispered. Her eyes were big and horrified, swimming with tears. 'We killed a thinking being. That's murder.'

'Bullshit's what that is,' George said. 'Even if it's not, what damn good does it do to go on about it?'

Whining - but not in the same urgent way as before - Mister Dillon pushed in between me and Shirley. There were big bald patches in the fur on his neck and back and chest, as if he had the mange. The tip of one ear seemed to be singed clean off. He stretched out his neck and sniffed the corpse of the thing lying beside the roll-up door.

'Grab him outta there,' George said.

'No, he's all right,' I said.

As D scented at the limp and now unmoving tangle of pink tendrils on the thing's head, he whined again. Then he lifted his leg and pissed on the severed piece of trunk or horn or whatever it was. With that done he backed away, still whining.

I could hear a faint hiss. The smell of cabbage was getting stronger, and the yellow color was fading from the creature's flesh. It was turning white. Tiny, almost invisible ribbons of steam were starting to drift up. That's where the worst of the stench was, in that rising vapor. The thing had started to decompose, like the rest of the stuff that had come through.

'Shirley, go back inside,' I said. 'You've got a 99 to handle.'

She blinked rapidly, like someone who is just coming to. 'The tanker,' she said. 'George S. Oh Lord, I forgot.'

'Take the dog with you,' I said.

'Yes. All right.' She paused. 'What about-?' She gestured at the tools scattered on the concrete, the ones we'd used to kill the creature as it lay against the door, mangled and screaming. Screaming what? For mercy? Would it (or its kind) have accorded mercy to one of us, had our positions been reversed? I don't think so . . . but of course I wouldn't, would I? Because you have to get through first one night and then another and then a year of nights and then ten. You have to be able to turn off the lights and lie there in the dark. You have to believe you only did what would have been done to you. You have to arrange your thoughts because you know you can only live with the lights on so much of the time.

'I don't know, Shirley,' I said. I felt very tired, and the smell of the rotting cabbage was making me sick to my stomach. 'What the fuck does it matter, it's not like there's going to be a trial or an inquest or anything official. Go on inside. You're the PCO. So communicate.'

She nodded jerkily. 'Come on, Mister Dillon.'

I wasn't sure D would go with her but he did, walking neatly behind one of Shirley's brown low-heeled shoes. He kept whining, though, and just before they went out the side door he kind of shivered all over, as if he'd caught a chill.

'We oughtta get out, too,' George said to Eddie. He started to rub at his eyes, realized he was still wearing gloves, and stripped them off. 'We've got a prisoner to take care of.'

Eddie looked as surprised as Shirley had when I reminded her that she had business to deal with over in Poteenville. 'Forgot all about the loudmouth sonofabitch,' he said. 'He broke his nose, George - I heard it.'

'Yeah?' George said. 'Oh what a shame.'

Eddie grinned. You could see him trying to pull it back. It widened, instead. They have a way of doing that, even under the worst of circumstances. Especially under the worst of circumstances.

'Go on,' I said. 'Take care of him.'

'Come with us,' Eddie said. 'You shouldn't be in here alone.'

'Why not? It's dead, isn't it?'

'That's not.' Eddie lifted his chin in the Buick's direction. 'Goddam fake car's hinky, still hinky, and I mean to the max. Don't you feel it?'

'I feel something,' George said. 'Probably just reaction from dealing with that . . .' He gestured at the dead creature. '. . . that whatever-it-was.'

'No,' Eddie said. 'What you feel's coming from the goddam Buick, not that dead thing. It breathes, that's what I think. Whatever that car really is, it breathes. I don't think it's safe to be in here, Hud. Not for any of us.'

'You're overreacting.'

'The hell I am. It breathes. It blew that pink-headed thing out on the exhale, the way you can blow a booger out of your nose when you sneeze. Now it's getting ready to suck back in. I tell you I can feel it.'

'Look,' I said, 'I just want one quick look around, okay? Then I'm going to grab the tarp and cover up . . . that.' I jerked my thumb at what we'd killed. 'Anything more complicated can wait for Tony and Curt. They're the experts.'

But calming him down was impossible. He was working himself into a state.

'You can't let them near that fake car until it sucks in again.' Eddie looked balefully at the Buick. 'And you better be ready for an argument on the subject. The Sarge'll want to come in and Curt will want to come in even more, but you can't let them. Because - '

'I know,' I said. 'It's getting ready to suck back in, you can feel it. We ought to get you your own eight hundred number, Eddie. You could make your fortune reading palms over the phone.'

'Yeah, go ahead, laugh. You think Ennis Rafferty's laughing, wherever he is? I'm telling you what I know, whether you like it or not. It's breathing. It's what it's been doing all along. This time when it sucks back, it's going to be hard. Tell you what. Let me and George help you with the tarp. We'll cover the thing up together and then we'll all go out together.'

That seemed like a bad idea to me, although I didn't know exactly why. 'Eddie, I can handle this. Swear to God. Also, I want to take a few pictures of Mr E.T. before he rots away to nothing but stone-crab soup.'

'Quit it,' George said. He was looking a little green.

'Sorry. I'll be out in two shakes of a lamb's tail. Go on, now, you guys, take care of your subject.'

Eddie was staring at the Buick, standing there on its big smooth whitewall tires, its trunk open so its ass end looked like the front end of a crocodile. 'I hate that thing,' he said. 'For two cents - '

George was heading for the door by then, and Eddie followed without finishing what he'd do for two cents. It wasn't that hard to figure out, anyway.

The smell of the decaying creature was getting worse by the minute, and I remembered the Puff-Pak Curtis had worn when he'd come in here to investigate the plant that looked like a lily. I thought it was still in the hutch. There was a Polaroid camera, too, or had been the last time I looked.

Very faint, from the parking lot, I heard George calling to Shirley, asking her if she was all right. She called back and said she was. A second or two later, Eddie yelled 'FUCK!' at the top of his voice. Another country heard from. He sounded pissed like a bear. I figured his prisoner, probably high on drugs and with a broken nose to boot, had upchucked in the back of Unit 6. Well, so what? There are worse things than having a prisoner blow chunks in your ride. Once, while I was assisting at the scene of a three-car collision over in Patchin, I stashed the drunk driver who'd caused it all in the back of my unit for safekeeping while I set out some road flares. When I returned, I discovered that my subject had taken off his shirt and taken a shit in it. He then used one of the sleeves as a squeeze-tube - you have to imagine a baker decorating a cake to get what I'm trying to describe here - and wrote his name on both side windows in the back. He was trying to do the rear window, too, only he ran out of his special brown icing. When I asked him why he'd want to do such a nasty goddam thing, he looked at me with that cockeyed hauteur only a longtime drunk can manage and said, 'It's a nasty goddam world, Trooper.'

Anyway, I didn't think Eddie yelling was important, and I went out back to the hutch where we kept our supplies without bothering to check on him. I was more than half-convinced the Puff-Pak would be gone, but it was still on the shelf, wedged between the box of blank videotapes and a pile of Field & Stream magazines. Some tidy soul had even tucked it into a plastic evidence-bag to keep the dust off. Taking it down, I remembered how crazy Curt had looked on the day I first saw him wearing this gadget, Curt also wearing a plastic barber's smock and a blue bathing cap and red galoshes. You're beautiful, wave to your adoring fans, I'd told him.

I put the mask to my mouth and nose, almost sure that what came out of it would be unbreathable, but it was air, all right - stale as week-old bread but not actually moldy, if you know what I mean. Better than the stench in the shed, certainly. I grabbed the battered old Polaroid One-Shot from the nail where it was hanging by the strap. I backed out of the hutch, and -

this could be nothing but hindsight, I'll be the first to admit it - I think I saw movement. Just a flash of movement. Not from the vicinity of the shed, though, because I was looking right at that and this was more a corner-of-the-eye phenomenon. Something in our back field. In the high grass. I probably thought it was Mister Dillon, maybe rolling around and trying to get that thing's smell off. Well, it wasn't. Mister Dillon wasn't up to any rolling around by then. By then poor old D was busy dying.

I went back into the shed, breathing through the mask. And although I hadn't felt what Eddie was talking about before, this time it came through loud and clear. It was like being outside the shed for a few moments had freshened me for it, or attuned me to it. The Buick wasn't flashing purple lightning or glowing or humming, it was only sitting there, but there was a sense of liveliness to it that was unmistakable. You could feel it hovering just over your skin, like the lightest touch of a breeze huffing at the hairs on your forearms. And I thought . . . this is crazy, but I thought, What if the Buick's nothing but another version of what I'm wearing on my face right now? What if it's nothing but a Puff-Pak? What if the thing wearing it has exhaled and now its chest is lying flat but in a second or two-Even with the Puff-Pak, the smell of the dead creature was enough to make my eyes water. Brian Cole and Jackie O'Hara, two of the handier build-em-and-fix-em fellows on the roster back then, had installed an overhead fan the year before, and I flipped the switch as I passed it.

I took three pictures, and then the One-Shot was out of film - I'd never even checked the load. Stupid. I tucked the photos into my back pocket, put the camera down on the floor, then went to get the tarp. As I bent and grabbed it, I realized that I'd taken the camera but walked out of the hutch right past the looped length of bright yellow rope. I should have taken it and cinched the loop in the end of it around my waist. Tied the other end to the big old hook Curds had mounted to the left of Shed B's side door for just that purpose. But I didn't do that. The rope was too goddam bright to miss, but I missed it anyway. Funny, huh? And there I was where I had no business to be on my own, but I was on my own. I wasn't wearing a security line, either. Had walked right past it, maybe because something wanted me to walk right past it. There was a dead E.T. on the floor and the air was full of a lively, chilly, gathering feeling. I think it crossed my mind that if I disappeared, my wife arid Ennis Rafferty's sister could join up forces. I think I might have laughed out loud at that. I can't remember for sure, but I do remember being struck humorous by something. The global absurdity of the situation, maybe.

The thing we'd killed had turned entirely white. It was steaming like dry ice. The eyes on the severed piece still seemed to be staring at me, even though by then they'd started to melt and run. I was as afraid as I've ever been in my life, afraid the way you are when you're in a situation where you could really die and you know it. That sense of something about to breathe, to suck in, was so strong it made my skin crawl. But I was grinning, too. Big old grin. Not quite laughing, but almost. Feeling humorous. I tossed the tarp over Mr E.T. and started backing out of the shed. Forgot the Polaroid entirely. Left it sitting there on the concrete.

I was almost at the door when I looked at the Buick. And some force pulled me toward it. Am I sure it was its force? Actually, I'm not. It might have just been the fascination deadly things have for us: the edge and the drop, how the muzzle of a gun looks back at us like an eye if we turn it this way and that. Even the point of a knife starts to look different if the hour's late and everyone else in the house has gone to sleep.

All this was below the level of thinking, though. On the level of thinking I just decided I couldn't go out and leave the Buick with its trunk open. It just looked too . . . I don't know, too getting ready to breathe. Or to bite. Something like that. I was still smiling. Might even have laughed a little.

I took eight steps - or maybe it was a dozen, I guess it could have been as many as a dozen. I was telling myself there was nothing foolish about what I was doing, Eddie J. was nothing but an old lady mistaking feelings for facts. I reached for the trunk-lid. I meant to just slam it and scat (or so I told myself), but then I looked inside and I said one of those things you say when you're surprised, I can't remember which one, it might have been Well I be dog or I'll be switched. Because there was something in there, lying on the trunk's plain brown carpeting. It looked like a transistor radio from the late fifties or early sixties. There was even a shiny stub of what could have been an antenna sticking up from it.

I reached into the trunk and picked the gizmo up. Had a good laugh over it, too. I felt like I was in a dream, or tripping on some chemical. And all the time I knew it was closing in one me, getting ready to take me. I didn't know if it got Ennis the same way, but probably, yeah. And I didn't care. I was standing in front of that open trunk, no rope on me and no one to pull me back, and something was getting ready to pull me in, to breathe me like cigarette smoke. And I didn't give Shit One. All I cared about was what I'd found in the trunk.

It might have been some sort of communication device - that's what it looked like - but it might have been something else entirely: where the monster kept its prescription drugs, some sort of musical instrument, maybe even a weapon. It was the size of a cigarette-pack but a lot heavier.

Heavier than a transistor radio or a Walkman, too. There were no dials or knobs or levers on it.

The stuff it was made of didn't look or feel like either metal or plastic. It had a fine-grained texture, not exactly unpleasant but organic, like cured cowhide. I touched the rod sticking out of it and it retracted into a hole on top. I touched the hole and the rod came back out. Touched the rod again and this time nothing happened. Not then, not ever. Although ever for what we called

'the radio' wasn't very long; after a week or so, the surface of it began to pit and corrode. It was in an evidence bag with a zip-lock top, but that didn't matter. A month later the 'radio'

looked like something that's been left out in the wind and rain for about eighty years. And by the following spring it was nothing but a bunch of gray fragments lying at the bottom of a plastic baggie. The antenna, if that's what it was, never moved again. Not so much as a silly millimeter.

I thought of Shirley saying We killed a thinking being and George saying that was bullshit.

Except it wasn't bullshit. The bat and the fish hadn't come equipped with things that looked like transistor radios because they had been animals. Today's visitor - which we'd hacked to pieces with tools we'd taken from the pegboard - had been something quite different. However loathsome it had seemed to us, no matter how instinctively we'd - what was that word? - we'd repudiated it, Shirley was right: it had been a thinking being. We'd killed it nevertheless, hacked it to pieces even as it lay on the concrete, holding out the severed stump of its trunk in surrender and screaming for the mercy it must have known we'd never give it. Couldn't give it. And that didn't horrify me. What did was a vision of the shoe on the other foot. Of Ennis Rafferty falling into the midst of other creatures like this, things with yellow knobs for heads under tangled masses of pink ropes that might have been hair. I saw him dying beneath their flailing, acid-lined trunks and hooking talons, trying to scream for mercy and choking on air he could barely breathe, and when he lay dead before them, dead and already beginning to rot, had one of them worked his weapon out of its holster? Had they stood there looking at it under an alien sky of some unimaginable color? As puzzled by the gun as I had been by the 'radio'? Had one of them said We just killed a thinking being to which another had responded That's bullshit? And as I thought these things, I also thought I ought to get out of there right away. Unless I wanted to investigate such questions in person, that was. So what did I do? What did I do next? I've never told anyone that, but I might as well tell now; seems foolish to come this far and then hold back.

I decided to get in the trunk.

I could see myself doing it. There would be plenty of space; you know how big the trunks of those old cars were. When I was a kid we used to joke that Buicks and Cadillacs and Chryslers were mob cars because there was room enough for either two polacks or three guineas in the trunk.

Plenty of space. Old Huddie Royer would get in, and lie on his side, and reach up, and pull the trunk closed. Softly. So it made just the faintest click. Then he'd lie there in the dark, breathing stale air from the Puff-Pak and holding the 'radio' to his chest. There wouldn't be much air left in the little tank, but there'd be enough. Old Huddie would just curl up and lie there and keep smilin and then . . . pretty soon . . .

Something interesting would happen.

I haven't thought of this in years, unless it was in the kind of dreams you can't remember when you wake up, the ones you just know were bad because your heart is pounding and your mouth is dry and your tongue tastes like a burnt fuse. The last time I thought consciously about standing there in front of the Buick Roadmaster's trunk was when I heard George Morgan had taken his own life. I thought of him out there in his garage, sitting down on the floor, maybe listening to the kids playing baseball under the lights over on McClurg Field around the other side of the block and then with his can of beer finished taking up the gun and looking at it. We might have switched over to the Beretta by then, but George kept his Ruger. Said it just felt right in his hand. I thought of him turning it this way and that, looking into its eye. Every gun has an eye. Anyone who's ever looked into one knows that. I thought of him putting the barrel between his teeth and feeling the hard little bump of the gunsight against the roof of his mouth. Tasting the oil. Maybe even poking into the muzzle with the tip of his tongue, the way you might tongue the mouthpiece of a trumpet -when you're getting ready to blow. Sitting there in the corner of the garage, still tasting that last can of beer, also tasting the gun-oil and the steel, licking the hole in the muzzle, the eye the slug comes out of at twice the speed of sound, riding a pad of hot expanding gases. Sitting there smelling the grass caked under the Lawnboy and a little spilled gasoline.

Hearing kids cheer across the block. Thinking of how it felt to hit a woman with two tons of Ford police cruiser, the thud and slew of it, seeing drops of blood appear on the windshield like the debut of a Biblical curse and hearing the dry gourdlike rattle of something caught in one of the wheelwells, what turned out to be one of her sneakers. I thought of all that and I think it was how it was for him because I know it's how it was for me. I knew it was going to be horrible but I didn't care because it would be kind of funny, too. That's why I was smiling. I didn't want to get away. I don't think George did, either. In the end, when you really decide to do it, it's like falling in love. It's like your wedding night. And I had decided to do it.

Saved by the bell, that's the saying, but I was saved by a scream: Shirley's. At first it was just a high shriek, and then there were words. 'Help! Please! Help me! Please, please help me!'

It was like being slapped out of a trance. I took two big steps away from the Buick's trunk, wavering like a drunk, hardly able to believe what I'd been on the verge of. Then Shirley screamed again and I heard Eddie yell: ' What's wrong with him, George? What's happening to him?'

I turned and ran out the shed door.

Yeah, saved by the scream. That's me.

THEN:

Eddie

It was better outside, so much better I almost felt, as I hurried along after George, that the whole thing in Shed B had been a dream. Surely there were no monsters with pink strings growing out of their heads and trunks with eyes in them and talons with hair growing out of them. Reality was our subject in the back seat of Unit 6, that debonair, girlfriend-punching puke, let's give him a great big hand, ladies and gentlemen, Brian Lippy. I was still afraid of the Buick - afraid as I'd never been before or have been since - and I was sure there was a perfectly good reason to feel that way, but I could no longer remember what it was. Which was a relief.

I trotted to catch up with George. 'Hey, man, I might have gotten a little carried away in there. If I did - '

'Shit,' he said in a flat, disgusted voice, stopping so quick I almost ran into his back. He was standing at the edge of the parking lot with his hands curled into fists that were planted on his hips. 'Look at that.' Then he called, 'Shirley! You all right?'

'Fine,' she called back. 'But Mister D . . . aw sugar, there goes the radio. I have to get that.'

'Doesn't this bite,' George said in a low voice.

I stepped up beside him and saw why he was upset. 6's right rear window had been broken clean out to the doorframe, undoubtedly by a pair of cowboy boots with stacked heels. Two or three kicks wouldn't have done that, maybe not even a dozen, but we'd given my old school chum Brian plenty of time to go to town. Rowdy-dow and a hot-cha-cha, as my old mother used to say. The sun was reflecting fire off a thousand crumbles of glass lying heaped on the hottop. Of Monsieur Brian Lippy himself, there was no sign. 'FUCK! I shouted, and actually shook my fists at Unit 6.

We had a burning chemical tanker over in Pogus County, we had a dead monster rotting in our back shed, and now we also had one escaped neo-Nazi asshole. Plus a broken cruiser window. You might think that's not much compared to the rest, kid, but that's because you've never had to fill out the forms, beginning with 24-A-24, Damaged Property, PSP and ending with Complete Incident Report, Fill Out All Appropriate Fields. One thing I'd like to know is why you never have a series of good days in which one thing goes wrong. Because it's not that way, at least not in my experience. In my experience the bad shit gets saved up until you have a day when everything comes due at once. That was one of those days. The granddaddy of them all, maybe.

George started walking toward 6. I walked beside him. He hunkered down, took the \valkie out of its holster on his hip, and stirred through the strew of broken Saf-T-Glas with the rubber antenna. Then he picked something up. It was our pal's cruicifix earring. He must have lost it when he climbed through the broken window.

'Fuck,' I said again, but in a lower voice. 'Where do you think he went?'

'Well, he's not in with Shirley, she sounds too chirpy. Which is good. Otherwise? Down the road, up the road, across the road, across the back field and into the woods. One of those. Take your pick.' He got up and looked into the empty back seat. 'This could be bad, Eddie. This could be a real fuckarow. You know that, don't you?'

Losing a prisoner was never good, but Brian Lippy wasn't exactly John Dillinger, and I said so.

George shook his head as if I didn't get it. 'We don't know what he saw. Do we?'

'Huh?'

'Maybe nothing,' he went on, and dragged a shoe through the broken glass. The little pieces clicked and scritched. There were droplets of blood on some of them. 'Maybe he hightailed it away from the shed. But of course going that way'd take him to the road, and even if he was as high as an elephant's eye he might not've wanted to go that way, in case some cop 20-base should see him -

a guy covered with blood, busted glass in his hair - and arrest him all over again.'

I was slow that day and I admit it. Or maybe I was still in shock. 'I don't see what you're -

'

George was standing with his head down and his arms folded across his chest. He was still dragging his foot back and forth, stirring that broken glass like stew. 'Me, I'd head for the back field. I'd want to cut around to the highway through the woods, maybe wash up in one of the streams back there, then try to hitch a ride. Only what if I get distracted while I'm making my escape? What if I hear a lot of screaming and thrashing coming from inside that shed?'

'Oh,' I said. 'Oh my God. You don't think he'd really stop what he was doing to check on what we. were doing, do you?'

'Probably not. But is it possible? Hell, yes. Curiosity's a powerful thing.'

That made me think of what Curt liked to say about the curious cat. 'Yeah, but who on God's earth would ever believe him.?'

'If it ever got into the American,' George said heavily, 'Ennis's sister might. And that would be a start. Wouldn't it?'

'Shit,' I said. I thought it over. 'We better have Shirley put out an all-points on Brian Lippy.'

'First let's let folks get the mess in Poteenville picked up a little. Then, when he gets here, we'll tell the Sarge everything - including what Lippy might have seen - and show him what's left in Shed B. If Huddie gets some half-decent pictures . . .' He glanced back over his shoulder.

'Say, where is Huddie? He should've been out of there by now. Christ, I hope - '

He got that far and then Shirley started screaming. 'Help! Please! Help me! Please, please help me!'

Before either of us could take a step toward the barracks, Mister Dillon came out through the hole he'd already put in the screen door. He was staggering from side to side like a drunk, and his head was down. Smoke was rising from his fur. More seemed to be coming out of his head, although at first I couldn't see where it was coming from; everywhere was my first impression. He got his forepaws on the first of the three steps going down from the back stoop to the parking lot, then lost his balance and fell on his side. When he did, he twisted his head in a series of jerks. It was the way people move in those oldtime silent movies. I saw smoke coming out of his nostrils in twin streams. It made me think of the woman sitting there in Lippy's bigfoot truck, the smoke from her cigarette rising in a ribbon that seemed to disappear before it got to the roof. More smoke was coming from his eyes, which had gone a strange, knitted white. He vomited out a spew of smoky blood, half-dissolved tissue, and triangular white things. After a moment or two I realized they were his teeth.

THEN:

Shirley

There was a great confused clatter of radio traffic, but none of it was directed to base. Why would it be, when all the action was either out at Poteenville Grammar School or headed that way?

George Stankowski had gotten the kids away from the smoke, at least, I got that. Poteenville Volunteer One, aided by pumpers from Statler County, were controlling the grassfires around the school. Those fires had indeed been touched off by burning diesel and not some flammable chemical.

It was chlorine liquid in the tanker, that was now confirmed. Not good, but nowhere near as bad as it might have been.

George called to me from outside, wanting to know if I was all right. Thinking that was rather sweet, I called back and told him I was. A second or two later, Eddie called out the f-word, angry. During all this I felt strange, not myself, like someone going through ordinary chores and routines in the wake of some vast change: the death of a friend, bad news from the doctor, a declaration of war.

Mister D was standing in the door to dispatch with his head down, whining at me. I thought the burned patches in his fur were probably paining him. There were more burned places, dottings of them, on both sides of his muzzle. I reminded myself that someone - Orv Garrett was the logical choice - should take him to the vet when things finally settled back down. That would mean making up some sort of story about how he got burned, probably a real whopper.

'Want some water, big boy?' I asked. 'Bet you do, don't you?'

He whined again, as if to say water was a very good idea. I went into the kitchenette, got his bowl, filled it at the sink. I could hear him clicking along on the lino behind me but I never turned around until I had the bowl full.

'Here you a - '

I got that far, then took a good look at him and dropped the bowl on the floor, splashing my ankles. He was shivering all over - not like he was cold but like someone was passing an electric current through him. And foam was dripping out from both sides of his muzzle.

He's rabid, I thought. Whatever that thing had, it's turned D rabid.

He didn't look rabid, though, only confused and in misery. His eyes seemed to be asking me to fix whatever was wrong. I was the human, I was in charge, I should be able to fix it.

'D?' I said. I dropped down on one knee and held my hand out to him. I know that sounds stupid

- dangerous - but at the time it seemed like the right thing. 'D, what is it? What's wrong? Poor old thing, what's wrong?'

He came to me, but very slowly, whining and shivering with every step. When he got close I saw a terrible thing: little tendrils of smoke were coming from the birdshot-spatter of holes on his muzzle. More was coming from the burned patches on his fur, and from the corners of his eyes, as well. I could see his eyes starting to lighten, as if a mist was covering them from the inside.

I reached out and touched the top of his head. When I felt how hot it was, I gave a little yell and yanked my hand back, the way you do when you touch a stove burner you thought was off but isn't. Mister D made as if to snap at me, but I don't think he meant anything by it; he just couldn't think what else to do. Then he turned and blundered his way out of the kitchen.

I got up, and for a moment the whole world swam in front of my eyes. If I hadn't grabbed the counter, I think I would have fallen. Then I went after him (staggering a little myself) and saying, 'D? Come back, honeybunch.'

He was halfway across the duty room. He turned once to look back at me - toward the sound of my voice - and I saw . . . oh, I saw smoke coming out of his mouth and nose, out of his ears, too.

The sides of his mouth drew back and for a second it seemed like he was trying to grin at me, the way dogs will do when they're happy. Then he vomited. Most of what came out wasn't food but his own insides. And they -were smoking.

That was when I screamed. 'Help! Please! Help me! Please, please help me!'

Mister D turned away as if all that screaming was hurting his poor hot ears, and went on staggering across the floor. He must have seen the hole in the screen, he must have had enough eyesight left for that, because he set sail for it and slipped out through it.

I went after him, still screaming.

THEN:

Eddie

'What's wrong with him, George?' I shouted. Mister Dillon had managed to get on his feet again. He was turning slowly around, the smoke rising from his fur and coming out of his mouth in gray billows. 'What's happening to him?'

Shirley came out, her cheeks wet with tears. 'Help him!' she shouted. 'He's burning up!'

Huddie joined us then, panting as if he'd run a race. 'What the hell is it?'

Then he saw. Mister Dillon had collapsed again. We walked cautiously toward him from one side.

From the other, Shirley came down the steps from the stoop. She was closer and reached him first.

'Don't touch him!' George said.

Shirley ignored him and put a hand on D's neck, but she couldn't hold it there. She looked at us, her eyes swimming with tears. 'He's on fire inside,' she said.

Whining, Mister Dillon tried to get on his feet again. He made it halfway, the front half, and began to move slowly toward the far side of the parking lot, where Curt's Bel Aire was parked next to Dicky-Duck Eliot's Toyota. By then he had to have been blind; his eyes were nothing but boiling jelly in their sockets. He kind of paddled along, pulling himself with his front paws, dragging his rump.

'Christ,' Huddie said. 'Look at that.'

'Help him!' Shirley cried. By then the tears were pouring down her face and her voice was so choked it was hard to make out what she was saying. 'Please, for the love of God, can't one of you help him?'

I had an image then, very bright and clear. I saw myself getting the hose, which Arky always kept coiled under the faucet-bib on the side of the building. I saw myself turning on the spigot, then running to Mister D and slamming the cold brass nozzle of the hose into his mouth, feeding water down the chimney that was his throat. I saw myself putting him out.

But George was already walking to him, toward the dying ruin that had been our barracks dog, taking his gun out of his holster as he went. D, meanwhile, was still paddling mindlessly along toward a spot of nothing much between Curt's Bel Aire and Dicky-Duck's Toyota, moving in a cloud of thickening smoke. How long, I wondered, before the fire inside broke through and he went up in flames like one of those suicidal Buddhist monks you used to see on television during the Vietnam war?

George stopped and held his gun up so Shirley could see it. 'It's the only thing, darlin.

Don't you think?'

'Yes, hurry,' she said, speaking very rapidly.

NOW:

Shirley

For me, it was the worst part - hearing Eddie tell how I agreed with George that only a bullet would serve. I turned to Ned, who was sitting there with his head down and his hair hanging on his brow. I put my hand on his chin and tilted it up so he'd have to look at me. 'There was nothing else we could do,' I said. 'You see that, don't you?'

For a moment he said nothing and I was afraid. Then he nodded.

I looked at Sandy Dearborn, but he wasn't looking at me. He was looking at Curtis's boy, and I've rarely seen him with such a troubled expression.

Then Eddie started talking again and I sat back to listen. It's funny how close the past is, sometimes. Sometimes it seems as if you could almost reach out and touch it. Only . . .

Only who really wants to?

THEN:

Eddie

In the end there was no more melodrama, just a Trooper in a gray uniform and the shadow of his big hat shielding his eyes bending and reaching out like you might reach out your hand to a crying child to comfort him. He touched the muzzle of his Ruger to the dog's smoking ear and pulled the trigger. There was a loud Pow! and D fell dead on his side. The smoke was still coming out of his fur in little ribbons. It was as if he'd swallowed a hotspring.

George bolstered his weapon and stood back. Then he put his hands over his face and cried something out. I don't know what it was. It was too muffled to tell. Huddie and I walked to where he was. Shirley did, too. We put our arms around him, all of us. We were standing in the middle of the parking lot with Unit 6 behind us and Shed B to our right and our nice barracks dog who never made any trouble for anybody lying dead in front of us. We could smell him cooking, and without a word we all moved farther to our right, upwind, shuffling rather than walking because we weren't quite ready to lose hold of one another. We didn't talk. We waited to see if he'd actually catch on fire like we thought he might, but it seemed that the fire didn't want him or maybe couldn't use him now that he was dead. He swelled some, and there was a gruesome little sound from inside him, almost like the one you get when you pop a paper lunchsack. It might have been one of his lungs. Anyway, once that happened, the smoke started to thin.

'That thing from the Buick poisoned him, didn't it?' Huddie asked. 'It poisoned him when he bit into it.'

'Poisoned him my ass,' I said. 'That pink-hair motherfucker firebombed him.' Then I remembered that Shirley was there, and she never had appreciated that kind of talk. 'Sorry,' I said.

She seemed not to have heard me. She was still looking fixedly down at Mister D. 'What do we do now?' she asked. 'Does anyone have any ideas?'

'I don't,' I said. 'This situation is totally out of control.'

'Maybe not,' George said. 'Did you cover up the thing in there, Hud?'

'Yeah.'

'All right, that's a start. And how does it look out in Poteenville, Shirl?'

'The kids are out of danger. They've got a dead bus driver, but considering how bad things looked at first, I'd say . . .' She stopped, lips pressed together so tight they were almost gone, her throat working. Then she said, 'Excuse me, fellas.'

She walked stiff-legged around the corner of the barracks with the back of her hand pressed against her mouth. She held on until she was out of sight - nothing showing but her shadow - and then there came three big wet whooping sounds. The three of us stood over the smoking corpse of the dog without saying anything, and after a few minutes she came back, dead white and wiping her mouth with a Kleenex. And picked up right where she'd left off. It was as if she'd paused just long enough to clear her throat or swat a fly. 'I'd say that was a pretty low score. The question is, what's the score here?'

'Get either Curt or the Sarge on the radio,' George said. 'Curt will do but Tony's better because he's more level-headed when it comes to the Buick. You guys buy that?'

Huddie and I nodded. So did Shirley. 'Tell him you have a Code D and we want him here as soon as he can get here. He should know it's not an emergency, but he should also know it's damn dose to an emergency. Also, tell him we may have a Kubrick.' This was another piece of slang peculiar (so far as I know) to our barracks. A Kubrick is a 2001, and 2001 is PSP code for 'escaped prisoner'. I had heard it talked about, but never actually called.

'Kubrick, copy,' Shirley said. She seemed steadier now that she had orders. 'Do you - '

There was a loud bang. Shirley gave a small scream and all three of us turned toward the shed, reaching for our weapons as we did. Then Huddle laughed. The breeze had blown the shed door closed.

'Go on, Shirley,' George said. 'Get the Sarge. Let's make this happen.'

'And Brian Lippy?' I asked. 'No APB?'

Huddie sighed. Took off his hat. Rubbed the nape of his neck. Looked up at the sky. Put his hat back on. 'I don't know,' he said. 'But if one does go out, it won't be any of us who puts it out. That's the Sarge's call. It's why they pay him the big bucks.'

'Good point,' George said. Now that he saw that the responsibility was going to travel on, he looked a little more relaxed.

Shirley turned to go into the barracks, then looked back over her shoulder. 'Cover him up, would you?' she said. 'Poor old Mister D. Put something over him. Looking at him that way hurts my heart.'

'Good idea,' I said, and started toward the shed.

'Eddie?' Huddie said.

'Yeah?'

'There's a piece of tarp big enough to do the job in the hutch. Use that. Don't go into the shed.'

'Why not?'

'Because something's still going on with that Buick. Hard to tell exactly what, but if you go in there, you might not come back out.'

'All right,' I said. 'You don't have to twist my arm.'

I got the piece of tarp out of the hutch - just a flimsy blue thing, but it would do. On the way back to cover D's body, I stopped at the roll-up door and took a look into the shed, cupping one hand to the side of my face to cut the glare. I wanted a look at the thermometer; I also wanted to make sure my old school chum Brian wasn't skulkassing around in there. He wasn't, and the temperature appeared to have gone up a degree or two. Only one thing in the landscape had changed. The trunk was shut.

The crocodile had closed its mouth.

NOW:

Sandy

Shirley, Huddie, Eddie: the sound of their entwined voices was oddly beautiful to me, like the voices of characters speaking lines in some strange play. Eddie said the crocodile had closed its mouth and then his voice ceased and I waited for one of the other voices to come in and when none did and Eddie himself didn't resume, I knew it was over. I knew but Ned Wilcox didn't. Or maybe he did and just didn't want to admit it

'Well?' he said, and that barely disguised impatience was back in his voice.

What happened when you dissected the bat-thing? Tell me about the fish. Tell me everything.

But - this is important - tell me a story, one that has a beginning and a middle and an end where everything is explained. Because I deserve that. Don't shake the rattle of your ambiguity in my face. I deny its place. I repudiate its claim. I want a story.

He was young and that explained part of it, he was faced with something that was, as they say, not of this Earth, and that explained more of it . . . but there was something else, too, and it wasn't pretty. A kind of selfish, single-minded grubbing. And he thought he had a right. We spoil the grief-stricken, have you ever noticed that? And they become used to the treatment.

'Well what?' I asked. I spoke in my least encouraging voice. Not that it would help.

'What happened when Sergeant Schoondist and my father got back? Did you catch Brian Lippy? Did he see? Did he tell? Jesus, you guys can't stop there!'

He was wrong, we could stop anyplace we chose to, but I kept that fact to myself (at least for the time being) and told him that no, we never did catch Brian Lippy; Brian Lippy remained Code Kubrick to this very day.

'Who wrote the report?' Ned asked. 'Did you, Eddie? Or was it Trooper Morgan?'

'George,' he said with a trace of a grin. 'He was always better at stuff like that. Took Creative Writing in college. He used to say any state cop worth his salt needed to know the basics of creative writing. When we started to fall apart that day, George was the one who pulled us together. Didn't he, Huddie?'

Huddie nodded.

Eddie got up, put his hands in the small of his back, and stretched until we could hear the bones crackle. 'Gotta go home, fellas. Might stop for a beer at The Tap on the way. Maybe even two. After all this talking, I'm pretty dry.'

Ned looked at him with surprise, anger, and reproach. 'You can't leave just like that!' he exclaimed. 'I want to hear the whole story!'

And Eddie, who was slowly losing the struggle not to return to being Fat Eddie, said what I knew, what we all knew. He said it while looking at Ned with eyes which were not exactly friendly.

'You did, kid. You just don't know it.'

Ned watched him walk away, then turned to the rest of us. Only Shirley looked back with real sympathy, and I think that hers was tempered with sadness for the boy.

'What does he mean, I heard it all?'

'There's nothing left but a few anecdotes,' I said, 'and those are only variations on the same theme. About as interesting as the kernels at the bottom of the popcorn bowl.

'As for Brian Lippy, the report George wrote said "Troopers Morgan and Jacubois spoke to the subject and ascertained he was sober. Subject denied assaulting his girlfriend and Trooper Jacubois ascertained that the girlfriend supported him in this. Subject was then released."'

'But Lippy kicked out their cruiser window!'

'Right, and under the circumstances George and Eddie couldn't very well put in a claim for the damages.'

'So?'

'So the money to replace it probably came out of the contingency fund. The Buick 8 contingency fund, if you want me to cross the t's. We keep it the same place now we did then, a coffee can in the kitchen.'

'Yar, dat's where it come from,' Arky said. 'Poor ole coffee can's taken a fair number of hits over d'years.' He stood up and also stretched his back. 'Gotta go, boys n girls. Unlike some of you, I got friends - what dey call a personal life on d'daytime talk shows. But before I leave, you want to know sup'm else, Neddie? About dat day?'

'Anything you want to tell me.'

'Dey buried D.' He said the verb the old way, so it rhymes with scurried. 'An right nex' to im dey buried d'tools dey use on dat t'ing poisoned im. One of em was my pos'hole digger, an I din'

get no coffee-can compensation for dat!'

'You didn't fill out a TS 1, that's why,' Shirley said. 'I know the paperwork's a pain in the fanny, but . . .' She shrugged as if to say That's the way of the world.

Arky was frowning suspiciously at her. 'TS 1 ? What kind of form is dat?'

'It's your tough-shit list,' Shirley told him, perfectly straight-faced. 'The one you fill out every month and send to the chaplain. Goodness, I never saw such a Norwegian squarehead. Didn't they teach you anything in the Army?'

Arky flapped his hands at her, but he was smiling. He'd taken plenty of ribbing over the years, believe me - that accent of his attracted it. 'Geddout witcha!'

'Walked right into it, Arky,' I said. I was also smiling. Ned wasn't. Ned looked as if the joking and teasing - our way of winding things back down to normal - had gone right past him.

'Where were you, Arky?' he asked. 'Where were you when all this was going on?' Across from us, Eddie Jacubois started his pickup truck and the headlights came on.

'Vacation,' Arky said. 'On my brudder's farm in Wisconsin. So dat was one mess someone else got to clean up.' He said this last with great satisfaction.

Eddie drove past, giving us a wave. We gave him a little right-back-atcha, Ned along with the rest of us. But he continued to look troubled.

'I gotta get it in gear, too,' Phil said. He disposed of his cigarette butt, got on his feet, hitched up his belt. 'Kiddo, leave it at this: your dad was an excellent officer and a credit to Troop D, Statler Barracks.' -

'But I want to know - '

'It don't matter what you want to know,' Phil told him gently. 'He's dead, you're not. Those are the facts, as Joe Friday used to say. G'night, Sarge.'

'Night,' I said, and watched the two of them, Arky and Phil, walk away together across the parking lot. There was good moonlight by then, enough for me to see that neither man so much as turned his head in the direction of Shed B.

That left Huddie, Shirley, and me. Plus the boy, of course. Curtis Wilcox's boy who had come and mowed the grass and raked the leaves and erased the snowdrifts when it was too cold for Arky to be outside; dirt's boy who had quit off the football team and come here instead to try and keep his father alive a little longer. I remembered him holding up his college acceptance letter like a judge holding up a score at the Olympics, and I was ashamed to feel angry with him, considering all that he'd been through and how much he'd lost. But he wasn't the only boy in the history of the world to lose his dad, and at least there'd been a funeral, and his father's name was on the marble memorial out front of the barracks, along with those of Corporal Brady Paul, Trooper Albert Rizzo, and Trooper Samuel Stamson, who died in the seventies and is sometimes known in the PSP as the Shotgun Trooper. Until Stamson's death, we carried out shotguns in roof-racks - if you needed the gun, you just had to reach up over your shoulder and grab it. Trooper Stamson was rear-ended while parked in the turnpike breakdown lane, writing up a traffic stop. The guy who hit him was drunk and doing about a hundred and five at the moment of impact. The cruiser accordioned forward.

The gas tank didn't blow, but Trooper Stamson was decapitated by his own shotgun rack. Since 1974

we keep our shotguns clipped under the dash, and since 1973 Sam Stamson's name has been on the memorial. 'On the rock,' we say. Ennis Rafferty is on the books as a disappearance, so he's not on the rock. The official story on Trooper George Morgan is that he died while cleaning his gun (the same Ruger that ended Mister Dillon's misery), and since he didn't die on the job, his name isn't on the rock, either. You don't get on the rock for dying as a result of the job; it was Tony Schoondist who pointed that out to me one day when he saw me looking at the names. 'Probably just as well,' he said. 'We'd have a dozen of those things out here.'

Currently, the last name on the stone is Curtis K. Wilcox. July 2001. Line of duty. It wasn't nice to have your father's name carved in granite when what you wanted - needed - was the father, but it was something. Ennis's name should have been carved there, too, so his bitch of a sister could come and look at it if she wanted to, but it wasn't. And what did she have? A reputation as a nasty old lady, that's what, the kind of person who if she saw you on fire in the street wouldn't piss on you to put you out. She'd been a thorn in our side for years and liking her was impossible but feeling sorry for her was not. She'd ended up with even less than this boy, who at least knew for sure that his father was over, that he was never going to come back in someday with a shamefaced grin and some wild story to explain his empty pockets and how come he had that Tiajuana tan and why it hurt like hell each time he had to make a little water.

I had no good feeling about the night's work. I'd hoped the truth might make things better (it'll set you free, someone said, probably a fool), but I had an idea it had made things worse instead. Satisfaction might have brought the curious cat back, but I could make out zero satisfaction on Ned Wilcox's face. All I saw there was a kind of stubborn, tired curiosity. I'd seen the same look on Curtis's face from time to time, most often when he was standing at one of Shed B's roll-up doors in that sidewalk superintendent's stance, - legs apart, forehead to the glass, eyes squinted a little, mouth thoughtful. But what's passed down in the blood is the strongest chain of all, isn't it? What's mailed along, one generation to the next, good news here, bad news there, complete disaster over yonder.

I said, 'As far as anyone knows, Brian Lippy just took off for greener pastures. It might even be the truth; none of us can say different for certain. And it's an ill wind that doesn't blow somebody some good; him disappearing that way might have saved his girlfriend's life.'

'I doubt it,' Huddie rumbled. 'I bet her next one was just Brian Lippy with different-colored hair. They pick up guys who beat them until they go through the change. It's like they define themselves through the bruises on their faces and arms.'

'She never filed a missing-persons on him, tell you that,' Shirley said. 'Not one that came across my desk, anyway, and I see the town and county reports as well as our own. No one in his family did, either. I don't know what happened to her, but he was an authentic case of good riddance to bad rubbish.'

'You don't believe he just slipped out through that broken window and ran away, do you?' Ned asked Huddie. 'I mean, you were there.'

'No,' Huddie said, 'as a matter of fact I don't. But what I think doesn't matter. The point's the same as the one Sarge has been trying to drum into your thick head all night long: we don't know.'

It was as if the kid didn't hear him. He turned back to me. 'What about my dad, Sandy? When it came to Brian Lippy, what did he believe?'

'He and Tony believed that Brian wound up in the same place as Ennis Rafferty and Jimmy the Gerbil. As for the corpse of the thing they killed that day - '

'Son of a bitch rotted quick,' Shirley said in a brisk that-ends-it voice. 'There are pictures and you can look at them all you want, but for the most part they're photos of something that could be anything, including a complete hoax. They don't show you how it looked when it was trying to get away from Mister D - how fast it moved or how loud it shrieked. They don't show you anything, really. Nor can we tell you so you'll understand. That's all over your face. Do you know why the past is the past, darling?'

Ned shook his head.

'Because it doesn't work.' She looked into her pack of cigarettes, and whatever she saw there must have satisfied her because she nodded, put them into her purse, and stood up.

'I'm going home. I have two cats that should have been fed three hours ago.'

That was Shirley, all right - Shirley the All-American Girlie, Curt used to call her when he felt like getting under her skin a bit. No husband (there'd been one once, when she was barely out of high school), no kids, two cats, roughly 10,000 Beanie Babies. Like me, she was married to Troop D. A walking cliche, in other words, and if you didn't like it, you could stick it.

'Shirl?'

She turned to the plaintive sound in Ned's voice. 'What, hon?'

'Did you like my father?'

She put her hands on his shoulders, bent down, and planted a kiss on Ned's forehead. 'Loved him, kid. And I love you. We've told you all we can, and it wasn't easy. I hope it helps.' She paused. 'I hope it's enough.'

'I hope so, too,' he said.

Shirley tightened her grip on his shoulders for a moment, giving him a squeeze. Then she let go and stood up. 'Hudson Royer - would you see a lady to her car?'

'My pleasure,' he said, and took her arm. 'See you tomorrow, Sandy? You still on days?'

'Bright and early,' I said. 'We'll do it all again.'

'You better go home and get some sleep, then.'

'I will.'

He and Shirley left. Ned and I sat on the bench and watched them go. We raised our hands as they drove past in their cars - Huddie's big old New Yorker, Shirley in her little Subaru with the bumper sticker reading MY KARMA RAN OVER MY DOGMA. When their taillights had disappeared around the corner of the barracks, I took out my cigarettes and had my own peek into the pack. One left.

I'd smoke it and then quit. I'd been telling myself this charming fable for at least ten years.

'There's really no more you can tell me?' Ned asked in a small, disillusioned voice.

'No. It'd never make a play, would it? There's no third act. Tony and your dad ran a few more experiments over the next five years, and finally brought Bibi Roth in on it. That would've been your father persuading Tony and me getting caught in the middle, as usual. And I have to tell you the truth: after Brian Lippy disappeared and Mister Dillon died, I was against doing anything with the Buick beyond keeping an eye on it and offering up the occasional prayer that it would either fall apart or disappear back to where it came from. Oh, and killing anything that came out of the trunk still lively enough to stand up and maybe run around the shed looking for a way out.'

'Did that ever happen?'

'You mean another pink-headed E.T.? No.'

'And Bibi? What did he say?'

'He listened to Tony and your dad, he took another look, and then he walked away. He said he was too old to deal with anything so far outside his understanding of the world and its works. He told them he intended to erase the Buick from his memory and urged Tony and Curt to do the same.'

'Oh, for God's sake! This guy was a scientist? Jesus, he should have been fascinated!'

'Your father was the scientist,' I said. 'An amateur one, yeah, but a good one. The things that came out of the Buick and his curiosity about the Buick itself, those were the things that made him a scientist. His dissection of the bat-thing, for instance. Crazy as that was, there was something noble about it, too, like the Wright Brothers going up in their little glue-and-paste airplane. Bibi Roth, on the other hand . . . Bibi was a microscope mechanic. He sometimes called himself that, and with absolute pride. He was a person who had carefully and consciously narrowed his vision to a single strip of knowledge, casting a blaze of light over a small area. Mechanics hate mysteries. Scientists - especially amateur scientists - embrace them. Your father was two people at the same time. As a cop, he was a mystery-hater. As a Roadmaster Scholar . . . well, let's just say that when your father was that person, he was very different.'

'Which version did you like better?'

I thought it over. 'That's like a kid asking his parents who they love best, him or his sister. Not a fair question. But the amateur Curt used to scare me. Used to scare Tony a little, too.'

The kid sat pondering this.

'A few more things appeared,' I said. 'In 1991, there was a bird with four wings.'

'Four-!'

'That's right. It flew a little bit, hit one of the walls, and dropped dead. In the fall of 1993, the trunk popped open after one of those lightquakes and it •was half-filled with dirt. Curt wanted to leave it there and see what would happen and Tony agreed at first, but then it began to stink. I didn't know dirt could decompose, but I guess it can if it's dirt from the right place.

And so . . . this is crazy, but we buried the dirt. Can you believe it?'

He nodded. 'And did my dad keep an eye on the place where it was buried? Sure he did. Just to see what would grow.'

'I think he was hoping for a few of those weird lilies.'

'Any luck?'

'I guess that depends on what you think of as luck. Nothing sprouted, I'll tell you that much.

The dirt from the trunk went into the ground not far from where we buried Mister D and the tools.

As for the monster, what didn't turn to goo we burned in the incinerator. The ground where the dirt went is still bare. A few things try to straggle up every spring, but so far they always die.

Eventually, I suppose that'll change.'

I put the last cigarette in my mouth and lit it.

'A year and a half or so after the dirt-delivery, we got another red-stick lizard. Dead.

That's been the last. It's still earthquake country in there, but the earth never shakes as hard these days. It wouldn't do to be careless around the Buick any more than it would to be careless around an old rifle just because it's rusty and the barrel's plugged with dirt, but with reasonable precautions it's probably safe enough. And someday - your dad believed it, Tony believed it, and I do too - that old car really will fall apart. All at once, just like the wonderful one-hoss shay in the poem.'

He looked at me vaguely, arid I realized he had no idea what poem I was talking about. We live in degenerate times. Then he said, 'I can feel it.'

Something in his tone startled me badly, and I gave him a hard stare. He still looked younger than his eighteen years, I thought. Just a boy, no more than that, sitting with his sneakered feet crossed and his face painted with starlight. 'Can you?' I asked.

'Yes. Can't you?'

All the Troopers who'd passed through D over the years had felt the pull of it, I guessed.

Felt it the way people who live on the coast come to feel the motions of the sea, the tides a clock their hearts beat to. On most days and nights we noticed it no more than you consciously notice your nose, a shape sitting at the bottom of all you see. Sometimes, though, the pull was stronger, and then it made you ache, somehow.

'All right,' I said, 'let's say I do. Huddie sure did - what do you think would have happened to him that day if Shirley hadn't screamed when she did? What do you think would have happened to him if he'd crawled into the trunk like he said he had a mind to do?'

'You really never heard that story before tonight, Sandy?'

I shook my head.

'You didn't look all that surprised, even so.'

'Nothing about that Buick surprises me anymore.'

'Do you think he really meant to do it? To crawl in and shut the lid behind him?'

'Yes. Only I don't think he had anything to do with it. It's that pull - that attraction it has. It was stronger then, but it's still there.'

He made no reply to that. Just sat looking across at Shed B.

'You didn't answer my question, Ned. What do you think would have happened to him if he'd crawled in there?'

'I don't know.'

A reasonable enough answer, I suppose - a kid's answer, certainly, they say it a dozen times a day- but I hated it just the same. He'd quit off the football team, but it seemed he hadn't forgotten all he'd learned there about bobbing and weaving. I drew in smoke that tasted like hot hay, then blew it back out. 'You don't.'

'No.'

'After Ennis and Jimmy and - probably - Brian Lippy, you don't.'

'Not everything goes on to somewhere else, Sandy. Take the other gerbil, for instance. Rosalie or Roslyn or whatever her name was.'

I sighed. 'Have it your way. I'm going down to The Country Way to bite a cheeseburger. You're welcome to join me, but only if we can let this go and talk about something else.'

He thought it over, then shook his head. 'Think I'll head home. Do some thinking.'

'Okay, but don't be sharing any of your thinking with your mother.'

He looked almost comically shocked. 'God, no!'

I laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. The shadows had gone out of his face and suddenly it was possible to like him again. As for his questions and his childish insistence that the story must have an ending and the ending must hold some kind of answer, time might take care of it.

Maybe I'd been expecting too many of my own answers. The imitation lives we see on TV and in the movies whisper the idea that human existence consists of revelations and abrupt changes of heart; by the time we've reached full adulthood, I think this is an idea we have on some level come to accept. Such things may happen from time to time, but I think that for the most part it's a lie.

Life's changes come slowly. They come the way my youngest nephew breathes in his deepest sleep; sometimes I feel the urge to put a hand on his chest just to assure myself he's still alive. Seen in that light, the whole idea of curious cats attaining satisfaction seemed slightly absurd. The world rarely finishes its conversations. If twenty-three years of living with the Buick 8 had taught me nothing else, it should have taught me that. At this moment Curt's boy looked as if he might have taken a step toward getting better. Maybe even two. And if I couldn't let that be enough for one night, I had my own problems.

'You're in tomorrow, right?' I asked.

'Bright and early, Sarge. We'll do it all again.'

'Then maybe you ought to postpone your thinking and do a little sleeping instead.'

'I guess I can give it a try.' He touched my hand briefly. 'Thanks, Sandy'.

'No problem.'

'If I was a pisshead about any of it - '

'You weren't,' I said. He had been a pisshead about some of it, but I didn't think he'd been able to help it. And at his age I likely would have been pissier by far. I watched him walk toward the restored Bel Aire his father had left behind, a car of roughly the same vintage as the one in our shed but a good deal less lively. Halfway across the parking lot he paused, looking at Shed B, and I paused with the smoldering stub of my cigarette poised before my lips, watching to see what he'd do.

He moved on instead of going over. Good. I took a final puff on my delightful tube of death, thought about crushing it on the hottop, and found a place for it in the butt-can instead, where roughly two hundred previous butts had been buried standing up. The others could crush out their smokes on the pavement if they wanted to - Arky would sweep them up without complaint - but it was better if I didn't do that. I was the Sarge, after all, the guy who sat in the big chair.

I went into the barracks. Stephanie Colucci was in dispatch, drinking a Coke and reading a magazine. She put the Coke down and smoothed her skirt over her knees when she saw me.

'What's up, sweetheart?' I asked.

'Nothing much. Communications are clearing up, though not as fast as they usually do after . .

. one of those. I've got enough to keep track of things.'

'What things?'

'9 is responding to a car-fire on the I-87 Exit 9 ramp, Mac says the driver's a salesman headed for Cleveland, lit up like a neon sign and refusing the field sobriety test. 16 with a possible break-in at Statler Ford. Jeff Cutler with vandalism over at Statler Middle School, but he's just assisting, the local police have got that one.'

'That it?'

'Paul Loving is 10-98 for home in his cruiser, his son's having an asthma attack.'

'You might forget to put that on the report.'

Steffie gave me a reproachful look, as if she hardly needed me to tell her that. 'What's going on out in Shed B?'

'Nothing,' I said. 'Well, nothing much. Normalizing. I'm out of here. If anything comes up, just . . .' I stopped, sort of horrified.

'Sandy?' she asked. 'Is something wrong?'

If anything comes up, just call Tony Schoondist, I'd been about to say, as if twenty years hadn't slipped under the bridge and the old Sarge wasn't dribbling mindlessly in front of Nick at Nite in a Statler nursing home. 'Nothing wrong,' I said. 'If anything comes up, call Frank Soderberg. It's his turn in the barrel.'

'Very good, sir. Have a nice night.'

'Thanks, Steff, right back atcha.'

As I stepped out, the Bel Aire rolled slowly toward the driveway with one of the groups Ned likes - Wilco, or maybe The Jayhawks - blaring from the custom speakers. I lifted a hand and he returned the wave. With a smile. A sweet one. Once more I found it hard to believe I'd been so angry with him.

I stepped over to the shed and assumed the position, that feet-apart, sidewalk-superintendent stance that makes everyone feel like a Republican somehow, ready to heap contempt on welfare slackers at home and flag-burning foreigners abroad. I looked in. There it sat, silent under the overhead lights, casting a shadow just as though it were sane, fat and luxy on its whitewall tires. A steering wheel that was far too big. A hide that rejected dirt and healed scratches -

that happened more slowly now, but it did still happen. Oil's fine was what the man said before he went around the corner, those were his last words on the matter, and here it still was, like an objet d'art somehow left behind in a closed-down gallery. My arms broke out in gooseflesh and I could feel my balls tightening. My mouth had that dry-lint taste it gets when I know I'm in deep shit. Ha'past trouble and goin on a jackpot, Ennis Rafferty used to say. It wasn't humming and it wasn't glowing, the temperature was up above sixty again, but I could feel it pulling at me, whispering for me to come in and look. It could show me things, it whispered, especially now that we were alone. Looking at it like this made one thing clear: I'd been angry at Ned because I'd been scared for him. Of course. Looking at it like this, feeling its tidal pull way down in the middle of my head - beating in my guts and my groin, as well - made everything easier to understand. The Buick bred monsters. Yes. But sometimes you still wanted to go to it, the way you sometimes wanted to look over the edge when you were on a high place or peer into the muzzle of your gun and see the hole at the end of the barrel turn into an eye. One that was watching you, just you and only you. There was no sense trying to reason your way through such moments, or trying to understand that neurotic attraction; best to just step back from the drop, put the gun back in its holster, drive away from the barracks. Away from Shed B. Until you got beyond the range of that subtle whispering voice. Sometimes running away is a perfectly acceptable response.

I stood there a moment longer, though, feeling that distant beat-beat-beat in my head and around my heart, looking in at the midnight-blue Buick Roadmaster. Then I stepped back, drew a deep breath of night air, and looked up at the moon until I felt entirely myself again. When I did, I went to my own car and got in and drove away.

The Country Way wasn't crowded. It never is these days, not even on Friday and Saturday nights. The restaurants out by Wal-Mart and the new Statler Mall are killing the downtown eateries just as surely as the new cineplex out on 32 killed off the old Gem Theater downtown.

As always, people glanced at me when I walked in. Only it's the uniform they're really looking at, of course. A couple of guys - one a deputy sheriff, the other a county attorney -said hello and shook my hand. The attorney asked if I wouldn't join him and his wife and I said no thanks, I might be meeting someone. The idea of being with people, of having to do any more talking that night (even small-talking), made me feel sick in my stomach.

I sat in one of the little booths at the back of the main room, and Cynthia Garris came over to take my order. She was a pretty blonde thing with big, beautiful eyes. I'd noticed her making someone a sundae when I came in, and was touched to see that between delivering the ice cream and bringing me a menu, she'd undone the top button on her uniform so that the little silver heart she wore at the base of her throat showed. I didn't know if that was for me or just another response to the uniform. I hoped it was for me.

'Hey, Sandy, where you been lately? Olive Garden? Outback? Macaroni Grille? One of those?' She sniffed with mock disdain.

'Nope, just been eatin in. What you got on special?'

'Chicken and gravy, stuffed shells with meat sauce - both of em a little heavy on a night like this, in my humble opinion - and fried haddock. All you can cat's a dollar more. You know the deal.'

'Think I'll just have a cheeseburger and an Iron City to wash it down with.'

She jotted on her pad, then gave me a real stare. 'Are you all right? You look tired.'

'I am tired. Otherwise fine. Seen anyone from Troop D tonight?'

'George Stankowski was in earlier. Otherwise, you're it, darlin. Copwise, I mean. Well, those guys out there, but . . .' She shrugged as if to say those guys weren't real cops. As it happened, I agreed with her.

'Well, if the robbers come in, I'll stop em single-handed.'

'If they tip fifteen per cent, Hero, let em rob,' she said. 'I'll get your beer.' Off she went, pert little tail switching under white nylon.

Pete Quinland, the grease-pit's original owner, was long gone, but the mini-jukeboxes he'd installed were still on the walls of the booths. The selections were in a kind of display-book, and there were little chrome levers on top to turn the pages. These antique gadgets no longer worked, but it was hard to resist twiddling the levers, turning the pages, and reading the songs on the little pink labels. About half of them were by Pete's beloved Chairman of the Board, hepcat fingersnappers like 'Witchcraft' and 'Luck Be a Lady Tonight'. FRANK SINATRA, said the little pink labels, and beneath, in smaller letters: THE NELSON RIDDLE ORCH. The others were those old rock and roll songs you never think about any more once they leave the charts; the ones they never seem to play on the oldies stations, although you'd think there'd be room; after all, how many times can you listen to 'Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)' before beginning to scream? I flipped through the jukebox pages, looking at tunes a dropped quarter would no longer call forth; time marches on, baby. If you're quiet you can hear its shuffling, rueful tread.

If anyone asks about that Buick 8, just tell em it's an impound. That's what the Old Sarge had said on the night we met out here in the back room. By then the waitresses had been sent away and we were pulling our own beers, running our own tab, and keeping our accounts straight down to the very last penny. Honor system, and why not? We were honorable men, doing our duty as we saw it.

Still are. We're the Pennsylvania State Police, do you see? The real road warriors. As Eddie used to say - when he was younger as well as thinner - it's riot just a job, it's a fuckin adventure.

I turned a page. Here was 'Heart of Glass', by BLONDIE.

On this subject you can't get far enough off the record. More words of wisdom from Tony Schoondist, spoken while the blue clouds of cigarette smoke rose to the ceiling. Back then everybody smoked, except maybe for Curt, and look what happened to him. Sinatra sang 'One for My Baby' from the overhead speakers, and from the steam tables had come the sweet smell of barbecued pork. The Old Sarge had been a believer in that off-the-record stuff, at least as regarded the Buick, until his mind had taken French leave, first just infantry squads of brain-cells stealing away in the night, then platoons, then whole regiments in broad daylight. What's not on the record can't hurt you, he'd told me once -this was around the time when it became clear it would be me who'd step into Tony's shoes and sit in Tony's office, ooh Grampa, what a big chair you have. Only I'd gone on the record tonight, hadn't I? Yeah, whole hog. Opened my mouth and spilled the whole tale. With a little help from my friends, as the song says. We'd spilled it to a boy who was still lost in the funhouse of grief Who was agog with quite natural curiosity in spite of that grief. A lost boy? Perhaps. On TV, such tales as Ned's end happily, but I can tell you that life in Statler, Pennsylvania, bears Christing little resemblance to The Hallmark Hall of Fame. I'd told myself I knew the risks, but now I found myself wondering if that was really true. Because we never go forward believing we will fail, do we? No. We do it because we believe we're going to save the goddam day and six times out often we step on the business end of a rake hidden in the high grass and up comes the handle and whammo, right between the eyes.

Tell me what happened when you dissected the bat. Tell me about the fish.

Here was 'Pledging My Love', by JOHNNY ACE.

Brushing aside every effort I made - that any of us made - to suggest this lesson was not in the learning but in the letting go. Just bulling onward. Sort of a surprise he hadn't read us the Miranda, because hadn't it been an interrogation as much as it had been stories of the old days when his old man had still been alive? Young and alive?