‘All right, yeah, I tried it. I wanted to see if that crazy engine worked.’
‘Of course it works. Someone drove it in, right?’
‘Roach says so, but when I got a good look under that hood, I had to wonder it he was lying or maybe hypnotized. Anyway, it’s still an open question. The key-thing won’t turn. It’s like the ignition’s locked.’
‘Where’s the key now?’
‘I put it back in the ignition.’
Ennis nodded. ‘Good. When you opened the door, did the dome light come on? Or isn’t there one?’
Curtis paused, thinking back. ‘Yeah. There was a dome light, and it came on. I should have noticed that. How could it come on, though? How could it, when the battery’s not hooked up?’
‘There could be a couple of C-cells powering the dome light, for all we know.’ But his lack of belief was clear in his voice.
‘What about the circuit from the door to the light? Are C-cells running that, too?’
But Ennis was tired of discussing the dome light. ‘What else?’
‘I saved the best for last,’ Curtis told him. ‘I had to do some touching inside, but I used a hanky, and I know where I touched, so don’t bust my balls.’
Ennis said nothing out loud, but gave the kid a look that said he’d bust Curt’s balls if they needed busting.
‘The dashboard controls are all fake, just stuck on there for show. The radio knobs don’t turn and neither does the heater control knob. The lever you slide to switch on the defroster doesn’t move. Feels like a post set in concrete.’
Ennis followed the tow-truck into the driveway that ran around to the back of Troop D.
‘What else? Anything?’
‘More like everything. It’s fucked to the sky.’ This impressed Ennis, because Curtis wasn’t ordinarily a profane man. ‘You know that great big steering wheel? I think that’s probably fake, too. I shimmied it — just with the sides of my hands, don’t have a hemorrhage — and it turns a little bit, left and right, but only a little bit. Maybe it’s just locked, like the ignition, but
. . .’
‘But you don’t think so.’
‘No. I don’t.’
The tow-truck parked in front of Shed B. There was a hydraulic whine and the Buick came out of its snout-up, tail-down posture, settling back on its whitewalls. The tow driver, old Johnny Parker, came around to unhook it, wheezing around the Pall Mall stuck in his gob.
Ennis and Curt sat in Cruiser D-19 meanwhile, looking at each other.
‘What the hell we got here?’ Ennis asked finally. ‘A car that can’t drive and can’t steer cruises into the Jenny station out on Route 32 and right up to the hi-test pump. No tags. No sticker . . .’ An idea struck him. ‘Registration? You check for that?’
‘Not on the steering post,’ Curt said, opening his door, impatient to get out. The young are always impatient. ‘Not in the glove compartment, either, because there is no glove compartment. There’s a handle for one, and there’s a latch-button, but the button doesn’t push, the handle doesn’t pull, and the little door doesn’t open. It’s just stage-dressing, like everything else on the dashboard. The dashboard itself is bullshit. Cars didn’t come with
wooden dashboards in the fifties. Not American ones, at least.’
They got out and stood looking at the orphan Buick’s back deck. ‘Trunk?’ Ennis asked.
‘Does that open?’
‘Yeah. It’s not locked. Push the button and it pops open like the trunk of any other car. But it smells lousy.’
‘Lousy how?’
‘Swampy.’
‘Any dead bodies in there?’
‘No bodies, no nothing.’
‘No spare tire? Not even a jack?’
Curtis shook his head. Johnny Parker came over, pulling off his work gloves. ‘Be anything else, men?’
Ennis and Curt shook their heads.
Johnny started away, then stopped. ‘What the hell is that, anyway? Someone’s idea of a joke?’
‘We don’t know yet,’ Ennis told him.
Johnny nodded. ‘Well, if you find out, let me know. Curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought him back. You know?’
‘Whole lot of satisfaction,’ Curt said automatically. The business about curiosity and the cat was a part of Troop D life, not quite an in-joke, just something that had crept into the day-today diction of the job.
Ennis and Curt watched the old man go. ‘Anything else you want to pass on before we talk to Sergeant Schoondist?’ Ennis asked.
‘Yeah,’ Curds said. ‘It’s earthquake country in there.’
‘Earthquake country? Just what in the hell does that mean?’
So Curds told Ennis about a show he’d seen on the PBS station out of Pittsburgh just the week before. By then a number of people had drifted over. Among them were Phil Candleton, Arky Arkanian, Sandy Dearborn, and Sergeant Schoondist himself.
The program had been about predicting earthquakes. Scientists were a long way from developing a sure-fire way of doing that, Curds said, but most of them believed it could be done, in time. Because there were forewarnings. Animals felt them, and quite often people did, too. Dogs got restless and barked to be let outside. Cattle ran around in their stalls or knocked down the fences of their pastures. Caged chickens sometimes flapped so frantically they broke their wings. Some people claimed to hear a high humming sound from the earth fifteen or twenty minutes before a big temblor (and if some people could hear that sound, it stood to reason that most animals would hear it even more clearly). Also, it got cold. Not everyone felt these odd pre-earthquake cold pockets, but a great many people did. There was even some meteorological data to support the subjective reports.
‘Are you shitting me?’ Tony Schoondist asked.
No indeed, Curt replied. Two hours before the big quake of 1906, temperatures in San Francisco had dropped a full seven degrees; that was a recorded fact. This although all other weather conditions had remained constant.
‘Fascinating,’ Ennis said, ‘but what’s it got to do with the Buick?’
By then there were enough Troopers present to form a little circle of listeners. Curtis looked around at them, knowing he might spend the next six months or so tagged the Earthquake Kid on radio calls, but too jazzed to care. He said that while Ennis was in the gas station office questioning Bradley Roach, he himself had been sitting behind that strange oversized steering wheel, still being careful not to touch anything except with the sides of his hands. And as he sat there, he started to hear a humming sound, very high. He told them he had felt it, as well.
‘It came out of nowhere, this high steady hum. I could feel it buzzing in my fillings. I think if it had been much stronger, it would’ve actually jingled the change in my pocket. There’s a word for that, we learned it in physics, I think, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it is.’
‘A harmonic,’ Tony said. ‘That’s when two things start to vibrate together, like tuning-forks or wine-glasses.’
Curtis was nodding. ‘Yeah, that’s it. I don’t know what could be causing it, but it’s very powerful. It seemed to settle right in the middle of my head, the way the sound of the powerlines up on the Bluff does when you’re standing right underneath them. This is going to sound crazy, but after a minute or so, that hum almost sounded like talking.’
‘I laid a girl up dere on d’Bluffs once,’ Arky said sentimentally, sounding more like Lawrence Welk than ever. ‘And it was pretty harmonic, all right. Buzz, buzz, buzz.’
‘Save it for your memoirs, bub,’ Tony said. ‘Go on, Curtis.’
‘I thought at first it was the radio,’ Curt said, ‘because it sounded a little bit like that, too: an old vacuum-tube radio that’s on and tuned to music coming from a long way off. So I took my hanky and reached over to kill the power. That’s when I found out the knobs don’t move, either of them. It’s no more a real radio than . . . well, than Phil Candleton’s a real State Trooper.’
‘That’s funny, kid,’ Phil said. ‘At least as funny as a rubber chicken, I guess, or — ‘
‘Shut up, I want to hear this,’ Tony said. ‘Go on, Curtis. And leave out the comedy.’
‘Yes, sir. By the time I tried the radio knobs, I realized it was cold in there. It’s a warm day and the car was sitting in the sun, but it was cold inside. Sort of clammy, too. That’s when I thought of the show about earthquakes.’ Curt shook his head slowly back and forth. ‘I got a feeling that I should get out of that car, and fast. By then the hum was quieting down, but it was colder than ever. Like an icebox.’
Tony Schoondist, then Troop D’s Sergeant Commanding, walked over to the Buick. He