From a Buick 8 (41 page)

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
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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 mother-fucker
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.'

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'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

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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 astory,
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.'

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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 inter-esting 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.
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'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.