He was inside now, howling and whining, lurching to get forward and pissing everywhere like a pup. Pissing in terror.
‘I know it’s not!’ Curt said. ‘You were right to begin with, I’ll give you a written apology if you want, just get him the fuck out!’
Huddie tried to reel Mister D back in, but he was a big dog, about ninety pounds, and he didn’t want to come. Curt had to lay on with him in order to get D going in the right direction.
In the end they dragged him out on his side, D fighting and howling and gnashing the air with his teeth the whole way. It was like pulling a sack of polecats, Sandy would say later.
When the dog was at last clear of the door, Curtis slammed it shut. The second he did, Mister Dillon relaxed and stopped fighting. It was as if a switch in his head had been flipped.
He continued to lie on his side for a minute or two, getting his breath, then popped to his feet.
He gave the Troopers a bewildered look that seemed to say, ‘What happened, boys? I was going along good, and then I kind of blanked out.’
‘Holy . . . fucking . . . shit,’ Huddie said in a low voice.
‘Take him back to the barracks,’ Curt said. ‘I was wrong to ask you to let him inside there, but I’m awful worried about Ennis.’
Huddie took the dog back to the barracks, Mister D once again as cool as a strawberry milkshake, just pausing to sniff at the shoes of the Troopers who had helped search the perimeter. These had been joined by others who had heard Mister D freaking out and had come to see what all the fuss was.
‘Go on in, guys,’ Sandy said, then added what they always said to the lookie-loos who gathered at accident sites: ‘Show’s over.’
They went in. Curt and Sandy watched them, standing there by the closed shed door. After awhile Huddie came back without Mister D. Sandy watched Curt reach for the doorknob of the shed door and felt a sense of dread and tension rise in his head like a wave. It was the first time he felt that way about Shed B, but not the last. In the twenty-odd years that followed that day, he would go inside Shed B dozens of times, but never without the rise of that dark mental wave, never without the intuition of almost-glimpsed horrors, of abominations in the corner of the eye.
Not that all of the horrors went unglimpsed. In the end they glimpsed plenty.
The three of them walked in, their shoes gritting on the dirty cement. Sandy flipped on the light-switches by the door and in the glare of the naked bulbs the Buick stood like one prop left on a bare stage, or the single piece of art in a gallery that had been dressed like a garage for the showing. What would you call such a thing? Sandy wondered. From a Buick 8 was
what occurred to him, probably because there was a Bob Dylan song with a similar title. The chorus was in his head as they stood there, seeming to illuminate that feeling of dread: And if I fall down dyin, y’know/She’s bound to put a blanket on my bed.
It sat there with its Buick headlights staring and its Buick grille sneering. It sat there on its fat and luxy whitewalls, and inside was a dashboard full of frozen fake controls and a wheel almost big enough to steer a privateer. Inside was something that made the barracks dog simultaneously howl in terror and yank forward as if in the grip of some ecstatic magnetism.
If it had been cold in there before, it no longer was; Sandy could see sweat shining on the faces of the other two men and feel it on his own.
It was Huddie who finally said it out loud, and Sandy was glad. He felt it, but never could have put that feeling into words; it was too outrageous.
‘Fucking thing ate im,’ Huddie said with flat certainty. T don’t know how that could be, but I think he came in here by himself to take another look and it just . . . somehow . . . ate im.’
Curt said, ‘It’s watching us. Do you feel it?’
Sandy looked at the glassy headlight eyes. At the down-turned, sneering mouth full of chrome teeth. The decorative swoops up the sides, which could almost have been sleek locks of slick hair. He felt something, all right. Perhaps it was nothing but childish awe of the unknown, the terror kids feel when standing in front of houses their hearts tell them are haunted. Or perhaps it was really what Curt said. Perhaps it was watching them. Gauging the distance.
They looked at it, hardly breathing. It sat there, as it would sit for all the years to come, while Presidents came and went, while records were replaced by CDs, while the stock market went up and a space shuttle exploded, while movie-stars lived and died and Troopers came and went in the Troop D barracks. It sat there real as rocks and roses. And to some degree they all felt what Mister Dillon had felt: the draw of it. In the months that followed, the sight of cops standing there side by side in front of Shed B became common. They would stand with their hands cupped to the sides of their faces to block the light, peering in through the windows running across the front of the big garage door. They looked like sidewalk superintendents at a building site. Sometimes they went inside, too (never alone, though; when it came to Shed B, the buddy system ruled), and they always looked younger when they did, like kids creeping into the local graveyard on a dare.
Curt cleared his throat. The sound made the other two jump, then laugh nervously. ‘Let’s go inside and call the Sarge,’ he said, and this time
NOW:
Sandy
‘. . . and that time I didn’t say anything. Just went along like a good boy.’
My throat was as dry as an old chip. I looked at my watch and wasn’t exactly surprised to see that over an hour had gone by. Well, that was all right; I was off duty. The day was murkier than ever, but the faint mutters of thunder had slid away south of us.
‘Those old days,’ someone said, sounding both sad and amused at the same time — it’s a trick only the Jews and the Irish seem to manage with any grace. ‘We thought we’d strut forever, didn’t we?’
I glanced around and saw Huddie Rover, now dressed in civilian clothes, sitting on Ned’s left. I don’t know when he joined us. He had the same honest Farmer John face he’d worn through the world back in ’79, but now there were lines bracketing the corners of his mouth, his hair was mostly gray, and it had gone out like the tide, revealing a long, bright expanse of brow. He was, I judged, about the same age Ennis Rafferty had been when Ennis did his Judge Crater act. Huddie’s retirement plans involved a Winnebago and visits to his children and grandchildren. He had them everywhere, so far as I could make out, including the province of Manitoba. If you asked — or even if you didn’t — he’d show you a US map with all his proposed routes of travel marked in red.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I guess we did, at that. When did you arrive, Huddie?’
‘Oh, I was passing by and heard you talking about Mister Dillon. He was a good old doggie, wasn’t he? Remember how he’d roll over on his back if anyone said You’re under arrest?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, and we smiled at each other, the way men do over love or history.
‘What happened to him?’ Ned asked.
‘Punched his card,’ Huddie said. ‘Eddie Jacubois and I buried him right over there.’ He pointed toward the scrubby field that stretched up a hill north of the barracks. ‘Must be fifteen years ago. Would you say, Sandy?’
I nodded. It was actually fourteen years, almost to the day.
‘I guess he was old, huh?’ Ned asked.
Phil Candleton said, ‘Getting up there, yes, but — ‘
‘He was poisoned,’ Huddie said in a rough, outraged voice, and then said no more.
‘If you want to hear the rest of this story — ‘ I began.
‘I do, ‘Ned replied at once.
.
‘ — then I need to wet my whistle.’
I started to get up just as Shirley came out with a tray in her hands. On it was a plate of thick sandwiches — ham and cheese, roast beef, chicken — and a big pitcher of Red Zinger iced tea. ‘Sit back down, Sandy,’ she said. ‘I got you covered.’