From a Buick 8 (21 page)

'I'm supposed to allow one of the men under my com-mand to risk his life in order to bring water to a pair of pedigreed mice. Is that what you're telling me, Trooper? I just want to be clear on this.'

If he expected Brian to blush or scuffle, he was disap-pointed. Brian just kept looking at him in that patient way, as if to say
Yes, yes, get it out of your system, boss - the sooner you get it out of your
system, the sooner you'll be able to relax and do the right thing.

'I can't believe it,' Tony said. 'One of us has lost his mind. Probably it's me.'

'They're just little guys,' Brian said. His voice was as patient as his face. 'And we're the ones who put them inthere, Sarge, they didn't exactly volunteer. We're responsible. Now I'll do it if you want, I'm the one who forgot - '

Tony raised his hands to the sky, as if to ask for divine intervention, then dropped them back to his sides. Red was creeping out of his collar, up his neck, and over his jaw. It met the red patches on his cheeks: howdy-do, neighbor.
'Hair
pie!' he muttered.

The men had heard him say this before, and knew better than to crack a smile. It is at this point that many people -perhaps even a majority - would be apt to yell, 'Oh, screw it! Do what you want!' and stamp away. But when you're in the big chair, getting the big bucks for making the big decisions, you can't do that. The D Troopers gathered in front of the shed knew this, and so, of course, did Tony. He stood there, looking down at his shoes. From out front of the barracks came the steady blat of Arky's old red Briggs & Stratton mower.

'Sarge - ' Curtis began.

'Kid, do us all a favor and shut up.'

Curt shut up.

After a moment, Tony raised his head. 'The rope I asked you to pick up - did you get it?'

'Yes, sir. It's the good stuff. You could take it mountain-climbing. At least that's what the guy at Calling All Sports said.'

'Is it in there?' Tony nodded at the shed.

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'No, in the trunk of my car.'

'Well thank God for small favors. Bring it over here. And I hope we never have to find out how good it is.' He looked at Brian Cole. 'Maybe you'd like to to go down to the Agway or the Giant Eagle, Trooper Cole. Get them a few bottles of Evian or Poland Spring Water. Hell, Perrier! How about some Perrier?'

Brian said nothing, just gave the Sergeant a little more of that patient look. Tony couldn't stand it and looked away. 'Mice with pedigrees!
Hair
pie!'

Curt brought the rope, a length of triple-braided yellow nylon at least a hundred feet long. He made a sliding loop, cinched it around his waist, then gave the coil to Huddie Royer, who weighed two-fifty and always anchored when D Troop played tug-of-war agaist the other PSP octets during the Fourth of July picnic.

'If I give you the word,' Tony told Huddie, 'you yank him back like he just caught fire. And don't worry about breaking his collarbone or his thick skull pulling him through the door. Do you understand that?'

'Yes, Sarge.'

'If you see him fall down, or just start swaying on his feet like he's lightheaded, don't wait for the word. Just yank. Got it?'

'Yes, Sarge.'

'Good. I'm very glad that someone understands what's going on here. Fucking hair-pie summer camp snipe-hunt is what it is.' He ran his hand through the short bristles of his hair, then turned to Curt again.

'Do I need to tell you to turn around and come out of there if you sense anything -
any slightest thing -
wrong?'

'No.'

'And if the trunk of that car comes open, Curtis, you
fly.
Got it? Fly out of there like a bigass bird.'

'I will.'

'Give me the video camera.'

Curtis held it out arid Tony took it. Sandy wasn't there - missed the whole thing - but when Huddie later told him it was the only time he had ever seen the Sarge looking scared, Sandy was just as glad he spent that afternoon out on patrol. There were some things you just didn't want to see.

'You have one minute in the shed, Trooper Wilcox. After that I drag you out whether you're fainting, farting, or singing "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean".'

'Ninety seconds.'

'No. And if you try one more time to bargain with me, your time goes down to thirty seconds.'

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Curtis Wilcox is standing in the sun outside the walk-in door on the north side of Shed B. The rope is tied around his waist. He looks young on the tape, younger with each passing year. He looked at that tape himself from time to time and probably felt the same, although he never said. And he doesn't look scared. Not a bit. Only excited. He waves to the camera and says, 'I'll be right back.'

'You better be,' Tony replies.

Curt turns and goes into the shed. For a moment he looks ghostly, hardly there, then Tony moves the camera forward to get it out of the bright sun and you can see Curt clearly again. He crosses directly to the car and starts around to the back.

'No!' Tony shouts. 'No, you dummy, you want to foul the rope? Check the gerbils, give em their goddam water, and get the hell out of there!'

Curt raises one hand without turning, giving him a thumbs-up. The picture jiggles as Tony uses the zoom to get in tighter on him.

Curtis looks in the driver's-side window, then stiffens and calls: 'Holy
shit!'

'Sarge, should I pull - ' Huddie begins, and then Curt looks back over his shoulder. Tony's juggling the picture again - he doesn't have Curt's light touch with the camera and the image is going everywhere - but it's still easy enough to read the wide-eyed expression of shock on Curtis's face.

'Don't you pull me back!' Curt shouts. 'Don't do it! I'm five-by-five!' And with that, he opens the door of the Roadmaster.

'Stay out of there!' Tony calls from behind the madly jiggling camera. Curt ignores him and pulls the plastic gerbil condo out of the car, waggling it gently back and forth to get it past the big steering wheel. He uses his knee to shut the Buick's door and then comes back to the shed door with the habitat cradled in his arms. With a square room at either end, the thing looks like some strange sort of plastic dumbbell.

'Get it on tape!' Curt is shouting, all but
frying
with excitement. 'Get it on tape!'

Tony did. The picture zooms in on the left end of the environment just as soon as Curt steps out of the shed and back into the sun. And here is Roslyn, no longer eating but scurrying about cheerfully enough. She becomes aware of the men gathered around her and turns directly toward the camera, sniffing at the yellow plastic, whiskers quivering, eyes bright and interested. It was cute, but the Troopers from Statler Barracks D weren't interested in cute just then.

The camera makes a herky-jerky pan away from her, traveling along the empty corridor to the empty gerbil gym at the far end. Both of the environment's hatches are latched tight, and nothing bigger than a gnat could get through the hole for the water-tube, but Jimmy the gerbil is gone, just the same -just as gone as Ennis Rafferty or the man with the Boris Badinoff accent, who had driven the Buick Roadmaster into their lives to begin with.

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NOW:

Sandy

I came to a stop and swallowed a glass of Shirley's iced tea in four long gulps. That planted an icepick in the center of my forehead, and I had to wait for it to melt.

At some point Eddie Jacubois had joined us. He was dressed in his civvies and sitting at the end of the bench, looking both sorry to be there and reluctant to leave. I had no such divided feelings; I was delighted to see him. He could tell his part. Huddie would help him along, if he needed helping; Shirley, too. By 1988 she'd been with us two years, Matt

Babicki nothing but a memory refreshed by an occasional postcard showing palm trees in sunny Sarasota, where Matt and his wife own a learn-to-drive school. A very successful one, at least according to Matt.

'Sandy?' Ned asked. 'Are you all right?'

'I'm fine. I was just thinking about how clumsy Tony was with that video camera,' I said. 'Your dad was great, Ned, a regular Steven Spielberg, but - '

'Could I watch those tapes if I wanted to?' Ned asked.

I looked at Huddie . . . Arky . . . Phil . . . Eddie. In each set of eyes I saw the same thing:
It's your
call.
As of course it was. When you sit in the big chair, you make all the big calls. And mostly I like that. Might as well tell the truth.

'Don't see why not,' I said. 'As long as it's here. I wouldn't be comfortable with you taking them out of the barracks - you'd have to call them Troop D property - but here? Sure. You can run em on the VCR

in the upstairs lounge. You ought to take a Dramamine before you look at the stuff Tony shot, though. Right, Eddie?'

For a moment Eddie looked across the parking lot, but not toward where the Roadmaster was stored. His gaze seemed to rest on the place where Shed A had been until 1982 or thereabouts. 'I dunno much about that,' he said. 'Don't remember much. Most of the big stuff was over by the time I got here, you
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know.'

Even Ned must have known the man was lying; Eddie was spectacularly bad at it.

'I just came out to tell you I put in those three hours I owed from last May, Sarge - you know, when I took off to help my brother-in-law build his new studio?'

'Ah,' I said.

Eddie bobbed his head up and down rapidly. 'Uh-huh. I'm all clocked out, and I put the report on those marijuana plants we found in Robbie Rennerts's back field on your desk. So I'll just be heading on home, if it's all the same to you.'

Heading down to The Tap was what he meant. His home away from home. Once he was out of uniform, Eddie J.'s life was a George Jones song. He started to get up and I put a hand on his wrist.

'Actually, Eddie, it's not.'

'Huh?'

'It's not all the same to me. I want you to stick around awhile.'

'Boss, I really ought to - '

'Stick around,' I repeated. 'You might owe this kid a little something.'

'I don't know what - '

'His father saved your life, remember?'

Eddie's shoulders came up in a kind of defensive hunch. 'I don't know if I'd say he exactly - '

'Come on, get off it,' Huddie said. 'I was
there.'

Suddenly Ned wasn't so interested in videotapes. 'My father saved your life, Eddie? How?'

Eddie hesitated, then gave in. 'Pulled me down behind a John Deere tractor. The O'Day brothers, they

- '

'The spine-tingling saga of the O'Day brothers is a story for another time,' I said. 'The point is, Eddie, we're having us a little exhumation party here, and you know where one of the bodies is buried. And I mean quite literally.'

'Huddie and Shirley were there, they can - '

'Yeah, they were. George Morgan was there, too, I think - '

'He was,' Shirley said quietly.

' - but so what?' I still had my hand on Eddie's wrist, and had to fight a desire to squeeze it again. Hard. I liked Eddie, always had, and he could be brave, but he also had a yellow streak. I don't know how those two things can exist side by side in the same man, but they can; I've seen it more than once.
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Eddie froze back in '96, on the day Travis and Tracy O'Day started firing their fancy militia machine-guns out of their farmhouse windows. Curt had to break cover and yank him to safety by the back of his jacket. And now here he was trying to squiggle out of his part in the other story, the one in which Ned's father had played such a key role. Not because he'd done anything wrong - he hadn't - but because the memories were painful and frightening.

'Sandy, I really ought to get toddling. I've got a lot of chores I've been putting off, and - '

'We've been telling this boy about his father,' I said. 'And what I think you ought to do, Eddie, is sit there quiet, maybe have a sandwich and a glass of iced tea, and wait until you have something to say.'

He settled back on the end of the bench and looked at us. I know what he saw in the eyes of Curt's boy: puzzle-ment and curiosity. We'd become quite a little Council of Elders, though, surrounding the young fellow, singing him our warrior-songs of the past. And what about when the songs were done? If Ned had been a young Indian brave, he might have been sent out on some sort of dream quest - kill the rightanimal, have the right vision while the blood of the animal's heart was still smeared around his mouth, come back a man. If there could be some sort of test at the end of this, I reflected, some way in which Ned could demonstrate new maturity and understanding, things might have been a lot simpler. But that's not the way things work nowadays. At least not by and large. These days it's a lot more about how you feel than what you do. And I think that's wrong.

And what did Eddie see in our eyes? Resentment? A touch of contempt? Perhaps even the wish that it had been him who had flagged down the truck with the flapper rather than Curtis Wilcox, that it had been him who had gotten turned inside-out by Bradley Roach? Always-almost-overweight Eddie Jacubois, who drank too much and would probably be making a little trip to Scranton for a two-week stay in the Member Assistance Program if he didn't get a handle on his drinking soon? The guy who was always slow filing his reports and who almost never got the punchline of a joke unless it was explained to him? I hope he didn't see any of those things, because there was another side to him - a better side - but I can't say for sure he didn't see at least some of them. Maybe even all of them.

' - about the big picture?'

I turned to Ned, glad to be diverted from the uncom-fortable run of my own thoughts. 'Come again?'

'I asked if you ever talked about what the Buick really was, where it came from, what it meant. If you ever discussed, you know, the big picture.'