He wished he could do better, but he couldn’t.
The cops came, they looked at the engine (the hood permanently up by that point, gaping like a mouth), they squatted down to look at the exotic glass exhaust system. They looked at everything, they touched nothing. John Q. and his family wouldn’t have known to keep their mitts off, but these were cops. They understood that, while the Buick might not be an evidential res as of right then, later on that might change. Especially if the man who had left it at the Jenny station should happen to turn up dead.
‘Unless that happens or something else pops, I intend to keep the car here,’ Tony told Matt Babicki and Phil Candleton at one point. It was five o’clock or so by then, all three of them had been officially off-duty for a couple of hours, and Tony was finally thinking about going home. Sandy himself had left around four, wanting to mow the grass before sitting down to dinner.
‘Why here?’ Matt asked. ‘What’s the big deal, Sarge?’
Tony asked Matt and Phil if they knew about the Cardiff Giant. They said they didn’t, and so Tony told them the story. The Giant had been ‘discovered’ in upstate New York’s Onondaga Valley. It was supposed to be the fossilized corpse of a gigantic humanoid, maybe something from another world or the missing link between men and apes. It turned out to be nothing but a hoax perpetrated by a Binghamton cigar-maker named George Hull.
‘But before Hull fessed-up,’ Tony said, just about everyone in the whole round world —
including P. T. Barnum — dropped by for a look. The crops on the surrounding farms were trampled to mush. Houses were broken into. There was a forest fire started by asshole John Q’s camping in the woods. Even after Hull confessed to having the “petrified man” carved in Chicago and shipped Railway Express to upstate New York, people kept coming. They
refused to believe the thing wasn’t real. You’ve heard the saying “There’s a sucker born every minute?” That was coined in 1869, in reference to the Cardiff Giant.’
‘What’s your point?’ Phil asked.
Tony gave him an impatient look. ‘The point? The point is that I’m not having any Cardiff fucking Giant on my watch. Not if 1 can help it. Or the goddam Buick of Turin, for that matter.’
As they moved back toward the barracks, Huddie Royer joined them (with Mister Dillon at his side, now heeling as neatly as a pooch in a dog-show). Huddie caught the Buick of Turin line and snickered. Tony gave him a dour look.
‘No Cardiff Giant in western PA; you boys mark what I say and pass the word. Because word of mouth’s how it’s gonna be done — I’m not tacking any memo up on the bulletin board. I know there’ll be some gossip, but it’ll die down. I will not have a dozen Amish farms overrun by lookie-loos in the middle of the growing season, is that understood?’
It was understood.
By seven o’clock that evening, things had returned to something like normal. Sandy Dearborn knew that for himself, because he’d come back after dinner for his own encore look at the car. He found only three Troopers — two off-duty and one in uniform — strolling around the Buick. Buck Flanders, one of the off-duties, was snapping pictures with his Kodak. That made Sandy a bit uneasy, but what would they show? A Buick, that was all, one not yet old enough to be an official antique.
Sandy got down on his hands and knees and peered under the car, using a flashlight that had been left nearby (and probably for just that purpose). He took a good gander at the exhaust system. To him it looked like Pyrex glass. He leaned in the driver’s window for awhile (no hum, no chill), then went back to the barracks to shoot the shit with Brian Cole, who was in the SC chair that shift. The two of them started on the Buick, moved on to their families, and had just gotten to baseball when Orville Garrett stuck his head in the door.
‘Either you guys seen Ennis? The Dragon’s on the phone, and she’s not a happy lady.’
The Dragon was Edith Hyams, Ennis’s sister. She was eight or nine years older than Ennis, a longtime widow-lady. There were those in Troop D who opined that she had murdered her husband, simply nagged him into his grave. ‘That’s not a tongue in her mouth, that’s a Ginsu knife,’ Dicky-Duck Eliot observed once. Curt, who saw the lady more than the rest of the Troop (Ennis was usually his partner; they got on well despite the difference in their ages), was of the opinion that Edith was the reason Trooper Rafferty had never married. ‘I think that deep down he’s afraid they’re all like her,’ he once told Sandy.
Coming back to work after your shift is through is never a good idea, Sandy thought after spending a long ten minutes on the phone with The Dragon. Where is he, he promised he’d be home by six-thirty at the latest, I got the roast he wanted down at Pepper’s, eighty-nine cents a pound, now it’s cooked like an old boot, gray as wash-water (only of course what the lady
said was warsh-warter), if he’s down at The Country Way or The Tap you tell me right now, Sandy, so I can call and tell him what’s what. She also informed Sandy that she was out of her water-pills, and Ennis was supposed to have brought her a fresh batch. So where the hell was he? Pulling overtime? That would be all right, she reckoned, God knew they could use the money, only he should have called. Or was he drinking? Although she never came right out and said so, Sandy could tell that the Dragon voted for drinking.
Sandy was sitting at the dispatch desk, one hand cupped over his eyes, trying to get a word in edgeways, when Curtis Wilcox bopped in, dressed in his civvies and looking every inch the sport. Like Sandy, he’d come back for another peek at the Roadmaster.
‘Hold on, Edith, hold on a second,’ Sandy said, and put the telephone against his chest.
‘Help me out here, rookie. Do you know where Ennis went after he left?’
‘He left?’
‘Yeah, but he apparently didn’t go home.’ Sandy pointed to the phone, which was still held against his chest. ‘His sister’s on the line.’
‘If he left, how come his car’s still here?’ Curt asked.
Sandy looked at him. Curtis looked back. And then, without a word spoken, the two of them jumped like Jack and Jill to the same conclusion.
Sandy got rid of Edith — told her he’d call her back, or have Ennis call her, if he was around.
That taken care of, Sandy went out back with Curt.
There was no mistaking Ennis’s car, the American Motors Gremlin they all made fun of. It stood not far from the plow Johnny Parker had moved out of Shed B to make room for the Buick. The shadows of both the car and the plow straggled long in the declining sun of a summer evening, printed on the earth like tattoos.
Sandy arid Curt looked inside the Gremlin and saw nothing but the usual road-litter: hamburger wrappers, soda cans, Tiparillo boxes, a couple of maps, an extra uniform shirt hung from the hook in back, an extra citation book on the dusty dashboard, some bits of fishing gear. All that rickrack looked sort of comforting to them after the sterile emptiness of the Buick. The sight of Ennis sitting behind the wheel and snoozing with his old Pirates cap tilted over his eyes would have been even more comforting, but there was no sign of him.
Curt turned and started back toward the barracks. Sandy had to break into a trot in order to catch up and grab his arm. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked.
‘To call Tony.’
‘Not yet,’ Sandy said. ‘Let him have his dinner. We’ll call him later if we have to. I hope to God we don’t.’
Before checking anything else, even the upstairs common room, Curt and Sandy checked Shed B. They walked all around the car, looked inside the car, looked under the car. There
was no sign of Ennis Rafferty in any of those places — at least, not that they could see. Of course, looking for sign in and around the Buick that evening was like looking for the track of one particular horse after a stampede has gone by. There was no sign of Ennis specifically, but . . .
‘Is it cold in here, or is it just me?’ Curt asked. They were about ready to return to the barracks. Curt had been down on his knees with his head cocked, taking a final look underneath the car. Now he stood up, brushing his knees. ‘I mean, I know it’s not freezing or anything, but it’s colder than it should be, wouldn’t you say?’