From a Buick 8 (2 page)

Then: '12, this is Statler.'

'12.'

'Jetta is registered to William Kirk Frady of Pittsburgh. He is previous . . . uh . . . wait . . .'

It was his only pause, and I could hear the hurried riffle of paper as he looked for the card Shirley had given him, the one with the call-codes on it. He found it, looked at it, tossed it aside with an impatient little grunt. Through all this, Eddie waited patiently in his cruiser twelve miles west. He would be looking at Amish buggies, maybe, or a farmhouse with the curtain in one of the front windows pulled aslant, indicating that the Amish family living inside included a daughter of marriageable age, or over the hazy hills to Ohio. Only he wouldn't really be seeing any of those things. The only thing Eddie was seeing at that moment - seeing clearly - was the Jetta parked on the shoulder in front of him, the driver nothing but a silhouette behind the wheel. And what was he, that driver? Rich man? Poor man? Beggarman? Thief?

Finally Ned just said it, which was exactly the right choice. '12, Frady is DUI times three, do you copy?'

Drunk man, that's what the Jetta's driver was. Maybe not right now, but if he had been speeding, the likelihood was high.

'Copy, Statler.' Perfectly laconic. 'Got a current lami-nate?' Wanting to know if Frady's license to drive was currently valid.

'Ah . . .' Ned peered frantically at the white letters on the blue screen.
Right in front of you, kiddo,
don't you see it?
I held my breath.

Then: 'Affirmative, 12, he got it back three months ago.'

I let go of my breath. Beside me, Shirley let go of hers. This was good news for Eddie, too. Frady was legal, and thus less likely to be crazy. That was the rule of thumb, anyway. : '12 on approach,' Eddie sent. 'Copy that?'

'Copy, 12 on approach, standing by,' Ned replied. I heard a click and then a large, unsteady sigh. I nodded to Shirley, who got moving again. Then I reached up andwiped my brow, not exactly surprised to find it was wet with sweat.

'How's everything going?' Shirley asked. Voice even and normal, saying that, as far as she was
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concerned, all was quiet on the western front.

'Eddie Jacubois called in,' Ned told her. 'He's 10-27.' That's an operator check, in plain English. If you're a Trooper, you know that it also means citing the operator for some sort of violation, in nine cases out often. Now Ned's voice wasn't quite steady, but so what? Now it was all right for it to jig and jag a little. 'He's got a guy in a Jetta out on Highway 99. I handled it.'

'Tell me how,' Shirley said. 'Go through your procedure. Every step, Ned. Quick's you can.'

I went on my way. Phil Candleton intercepted me at the door to my office. He nodded toward the dispatch cubicle. 'How'd the kid do?'

'Did all right,' I said, and stepped past him into my own cubicle. I didn't realize my legs had gone rubbery until I sat down and felt them trembling.

His sisters, Joan and Janet, were identicals. They had each other, and their mother had a little bit of her gone man in them: Curtis's blue, slightly uptilted eyes, his blond hair, his full lips (the nickname in Curt's yearbook, under his name, had been 'Elvis'). Michelle had her man in her son, as well, where the resemblance was even more striking. Add a few wrinkles around the eyes and Ned could have been his own father when Curtis first came on the cops.

That's what they had. What Ned had was us.

One day in April he came into the barracks with a great big sunny smile on his face. It made him look younger and sweeter. But, I remember thinking, we all of us look younger and sweeter when we smile our real smiles - the ones that come when we are genuinely happy and not just trying to play some dumb social game. It struck me fresh that day because Ned didn't smile much. Certainly not
big.
I don't think I realized it until that day because he was polite and responsive and quick-witted. A pleasure to have around, in other words. You didn't notice how grave he was until that rare day when you saw him brighten up and shine.

He came to the center of the room, and all the little conversations stopped. He had a paper in his hand. There was a complicated-looking gold seal at the top. 'Pitt!' he said, holding the paper up in both hands like an Olympic judge's scorecard. 'I got into Pitt, you guys! And they gave me a scholarship!

Almost a full boat!'

Everyone applauded. Shirley kissed him smack on the mouth, and the kid blushed all the way down to his collar. Huddie Royer, who was off-duty that day and just hanging around, stewing about some case in which he had to testify, went out and came back with a bag of L'il Debbie cakes. Arky used his key to open the soda machine, and we had a party. Half an hour or so, no more, but it was good while it lasted. Everyone shook Ned's hand, the acceptance letter from Pitt made its way around the room (twice, I think), and a couple of cops who'd been at home dropped by just to talk to him and pass along their congrats.

Then, of course, the real world got back into the act. It's quiet over here in western Pennsylvania, but not dead. There was a farmhouse fire in Pogus City (which is a city about as much as I'm the Archduke Ferdinand), and an overturned Amish buggy on Highway 20. The Amish keep to themselves, but they'll
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gladly take a little outside help in a case like that. The horse was okay, which was the big thing. The worst buggy fuckups happen on Friday and Saturday nights, when the younger bucks in black have a tendency to get drunk out behind the barn. Sometimes they get a 'worldly person' to buy them a bottle or a case of Iron City beer, and sometimes they drink their own stuff, a really murderous corn shine you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. It's just part of the scene; it's our world, and mostly we like it, including the Amish with their big neat farms and the orange triangles on the back of their small neat buggies.

And there's always paperwork, the usual stacks of dupli-cate and triplicate in my office. It gets worse every year. Why I ever wanted to be the guy in charge is beyond me now. I took the test that qualified me for Sergeant Commanding when Tony Schoondist suggested it, so I must have had a reason back then, but these days it seems to elude me.

Around six o'clock I went out back to have a smoke. We have a bench there facing the parking lot. Beyond it is a very pretty western view. Ned Wilcox was sitting on the bench with his acceptance letter from Pitt in one hand and tears rolling down his face. He glanced at me, then looked away, scrubbing his eyes with the palm of his hand.

I sat down beside him, thought about putting my arm around his shoulder, didn't do it. If you have to think about a thing like that, doing it usually feels phony. I have never married, and what I know about fathering you could write on the head of a pin with room left over for the Lord's Prayer. I lit a cigarette and smoked it awhile. 'It's all right, Ned,' I said eventually. It was the only thing I could think of, and I had no idea what it meant.

'I know,' he replied at once in a muffled, trying-not-to-cry voice, and then, almost as if it was part of the same sentence, a continuation of the same thought: 'No it ain't.'

Hearing him use that word, that
ain't,
made me realize how bad he was hurt. Something had gored him in the stomach. It was the sort of word he would have trained himself out of long ago, just so he wouldn't be lumped with the rest of the Statler County hicks, the pickup-truck-n-snowmobile gomers from towns like Patchin and Pogus City. Even his sisters, eight years younger than he was, had probably given up
ain't
by then, and for much the same reasons. Don't say ain't or your mother will faint and your father will fall in a bucket of paint. Yeah, what father?

I smoked and said nothing. On the far side of the parking lot by one of the county roadsalt piles was a cluster of wooden buildings that needed either sprucing up or tearing down. They were the old Motor Pool buildings. Statler County had moved its plows, graders, 'dozers, and asphalt rollers a mile or so down the road ten years before, into a new brick facility that looked like a prison lockdown unit. All that remained here was the one big pile of salt (which we were using ourselves, little by little - once upon a time, that pile had been a mountain) and a few ramshackle wooden buildings. One of them was Shed B. The black paint letters over the door - one of those wide garage doors that run up on rails - were faded but still legible. Was I thinking about the Buick Roadmaster inside as I sat there next to the crying boy, wanting to put my arm around him and not knowing how? I don't know. I guess I might have been, but I don't think we know all the things we're thinking. Freud might have been full of shit about a lot of things, but not that one. I don't know about a subconscious, but there's a pulse in our heads, all right, same as there's one in our chests, and it carries unformed, no-language thoughts that most times we can't even read, and they are usually the important ones.

Ned rattled the letter.
'He's
the one I really want to show this to.
He's
the one who wanted to go to Pitt when he was a kid but couldn't afford it. He's the reason I
applied,
for God's sake.' A pause; then, almost too low to hear: 'This is fucked up, Sandy.'

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'What did your mother say when you showed her?'

That got a laugh, watery but genuine. 'She didn't
say.
She screamed like a lady who just won a trip to Bermuda on a gameshow. Then she cried.' Ned turned to me. His own tears had stopped, but his eyes were red and swollen. He looked a hell of a lot younger than eighteen just then. The sweet smile resurfaced for a moment. 'Basically, she was great about it. Even the Little J's were great about it. Like you guys. Shirley kissing me . . . man, I got goosebumps.'

I laughed, thinking that Shirley might have raised a fewgoosebumps of her own. She liked him, he was a handsome kid, arid the idea of playing Mrs Robinson might have crossed her mind. Probably not, but it wasn't impossible. Her husband had been out of the picture almost five years by then. Ned's smile faded. He rattled the acceptance letter again. 'I knew this was yes as soon as I took it out of the mailbox. I could just tell, somehow. And I started missing him all over again. I mean
fierce.'

'I know,' I said, but of course I didn't. My own father was still alive, a hale and genially profane man of seventy-four. At seventy, my mother was all that and a bag of chips. Ned sighed, looking off at the hills. 'How he went out is just so
dumb,'
he said. '1 can't even tell my kids, if I ever have any, that Grampy went down in a hail of bullets while foiling the bank robbers or the militia guys who were trying to put a bomb in the county courthouse. Nothing like that.'

'No,' I agreed, 'nothing like that.'

'I can't even say it was because he was careless. He was just . . . a drunk just came along and just . . .'

He bent over, wheezing like an old man with a cramp in his belly, and this time I at least put my hand on his back. He was trying so hard not to cry, that's what got to me. Trying so hard to be a man, whatever that means to an eighteen-year-old boy.

'Ned. It's all right.'

He shook his head violently. 'If there was a God, there'd be a reason,' he said. He was looking down at the ground. My hand was still on his back, and I could feel it heaving up and down, like he'd just run a race. 'If there was a God, there'd be some kind of thread running through it. But there isn't. Not that I can see.'

'If you have kids, Ned, tell them their grandfather died in the line of duty. Then take them here and show them his name on the plaque, with all the others.'

He didn't seem to hear me. 'I have this dream. It's a bad one.' He paused, thinking how to say it, then just plungedahead. 'I dream it was all a dream. Do you know what I'm saying?'

I nodded.

'I wake up crying, and I look around my room, and it's sunny. Birds are singing. It's morning. I can smell coffee downstairs and I think, "He's okay. Jesus and thank you God, the old man's okay." I don't hear him talking or anything, but I just know. And I think what a stupid idea it •was, that he could be walking up the side of some guy's rig to give him a warning about a flapper and just get creamed by a drunk, the sort of idea you could only have in a stupid dream where everything seems so
real . . .
and I
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start to swing my legs out of bed . . . sometimes I see my ankles go into a patch of sun . . . it even feels warm . . . and then I wake up for real, and it's dark, and I've got the blankets pulled up around me but I'm still cold, shivering and cold, and I know that the
dream
was a dream.'

'That's awful,' I said, remembering that as a boy I'd had my own version of the same dream. It was about my dog. I thought to tell him that, then didn't. Grief is grief, but a dog is not a father.

'It wouldn't be so bad if I had it every night. Then I think I'd know, even while I was asleep, that there's no smell of coffee, that it's not even morning. But it doesn't come . . . doesn't come . . . and then when it finally does, I get fooled again. I'm so happy and relieved, I even think of something nice I'll do for him, like buy him that five-iron he wanted for his birthday . . . and then I wake up. I get fooled all over again.' Maybe it was the thought of his father's birthday, not celebrated this year and never to be celebrated again, that started fresh tears running down his cheeks. 'I just hate getting fooled. It's like when Mr Jones came down and got me out of World History class to tell me, but even worse. Because I'm alone when I wake up in the dark. Mr Grenville - he's the guidance counselor at school - says time heals all wounds, but it's been almost a year and I'm still having that dream.'

I nodded. I was remembering Ten-Pound, shot by a hunter one November, growing stiff in his own blood under a white sky when I found him. A white sky promising a winter's worth of snow. In
my
dream it was always another dog when I got close enough to see, not Ten-Pound at all, and I felt that same relief. Until I woke up, at least. And thinking of Ten-Pound made me think, for a moment, of our barracks mascot back in the old days. Mister Dillon, his name had been, after the TV sheriff played by James Arness. A good dog.