They broke only once, to go inside and get sweaters. It was a hot day outside, but in Shed B the needle of the thermometer had settled just a hair below 48. Sandy didn’t like it, and when the two of them came out, he suggested that they roll up the doors and let in some of
the day’s heat. Mister Dillon was snoozing in the kitchenette, Sandy said; they could close him in there.
‘No,’ Tony said, and Sandy could see that Curtis went along with that call.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. Just a feeling.’
By three that afternoon, while Sandy was dutifully printing his name in the duty-book under 2nd Shift/3P-llP and getting ready to head out on patrol, the temperature in Shed B had dropped to 47. That was forty degrees colder than the summer day on the other side of those thin wooden walls.
It must have been around six o’clock, while Sandy was parked around the side of Jimmy’s Diner on the old Statler Pike, drinking coffee and watching for speeders, that the Roadmaster gave birth for the first time.
Arky Arkariian had been the first person to see the thing that came out of the Buick, although he didn’t know what he was seeing. Things were quiet at the Troop D barracks. Not serene, exactly, but quiet. This was due in large measure to Curt and Tony’s report of zero radiation emanating from Shed B. Arky had come in from his trailer in Dreamland Park on top of The Bluffs, wanting his own little off-duty peek at the impounded car. He had it to himself; Shed B was for the time being entirely deserted. Forty yards away, the barracks was midshift quiet, which was about as quiet as it ever got. Matt Babicki had clocked out for the night and one of the younger cops was running dispatch. The Sarge had gone home at five o’clock. Curt, who had given his wife some cock-and-bull story about his call-out the night before, was presumably back in his flip-flop sandals and finishing his lawn like a good boy.
At five minutes past seven, the Troop D custodian (by then very pale, very thoughtful, and very scared) went past the kid in the dispatch cubby and into the kitchenette, to see who he could find. He wanted someone who wasn’t a rookie, someone who knew the score. He found Huddie Royer, just putting the finishing touches on a big pot of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
NOW:
Arky
‘Well?’ the kid ask, and there was so much of his daddy in him just then — the way he sat there on the bench, the way his eyes stared into yours, the way his eyebrows quirk, most of all the headlong impatience. That impatience was his dad all over. ‘Well?
‘This isn’t my part of the story,’ Sandy tell him. ‘I wasn’t there. These other two were, though.’
So then, sure, the kid switch over from Sandy to me and Huddie.
‘You do it, Hud,’ I say. ‘You’re used to makin reports.’
‘Shit on that,’ he tell me right back, ‘you were there first. You saw it first. You start.’
‘Aw — ‘
‘Well one of you start!’ the boy tell us, and wham! He hit his forehead with the butt of his palm, right between the eyes. I had to laugh at that.
‘Go on, Arky,’ the Sarge tell me.
‘Ah, nuts,’ I say. ‘I ain’t never told it, you know, like a story. Don’t know how it’ll come out.’
‘Give it your best shot,’ Sarge say, and so I do. It was pretty hard going at first — seemed I could feel the kid’s eyes boring into me like nails and I kept thinking, He ain’t gonna believe this, who would? But it got easier after a little bit. If you talk about something that happened long ago, you find it open up to you all over again. It open up like a flower. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, I guess. Sitting there that night, talking to Curtis Wilcox’s boy, it felt like both.
Huddie join in after awhile and started to help. He remembered all sorts of things, even the part about how it was Joan Baez on the radio. ‘Redemption’s in the details,’ old Sarge used to say (usually when someone left something out of a report that should have been in). And all through it the kid sittin dere on the bench, looking at us, his eyes getting bigger and bigger as the evening darkened and give up its smells like it does in the summer and the bats flew overhead and thunder rumbled all the way in the south. It made me sad to see how much he looked like his father. I don’t know why.
He only broke in once. Turned to Sandy, wanting to know if we still had the—
‘Yes,’ Sandy tell him right off. ‘Oh yes. We certainly do. Plus tons of pictures. Polaroids, mostly. If there’s one thing cops know about, kiddo, it’s preserving the chain of evidence.
Now be quiet. You wanted to know; let the man tell you.’
I know by that he mean me, so I started talking again.
THEN
Arky had an old Ford pickup in those days, a standard three-shifter (But I got four if you count d’reverse, he used to joke) with a squeaky clutch. He parked it where he would still be parking twenty-three years later, although by then he would have traded up to a Dodge Ram with the automatic transmission and the four-wheel drive.
In 1979 there was an ancient Statler County schoolbus at the far end of the parking lot, a rust-rotten yellow barge that had been there since the Korean War at least, sinking deeper and deeper into the weeds and the dirt with each passing year. Why no one ever took it away was just another of life’s mysteries. Arky nestled his truck in beside it, then crossed to Shed B and looked through one of the windows in the roll-up door, cupping his hands to block the light of the sun, which was on the wester.
There was a light on overhead and the Buick sat beneath it, looking to Arky like a display model, the kind of unit that shows up so pretty under the lights that anyone in his right mind would want to sign on the line and drive that honey home. Everything looked 5-by except for the trunk-lid. It was up again.
I ought to report that to the duty officer, Arky thought. He wasn’t a cop, just a custodian, but sometimes trooper gray rubs off. He stepped back from the window, then happened to glance up at the thermometer Curt and the Sergeant had mounted from one of the overhead beams. The temperature in the shed had gone up again, and by quite a lot. Sixty-one degrees in there. It occurred to Arky that the Buick was like some sort of weird refrigerator coil that had now turned itself off (or perhaps burnt itself out during the fireworks show).
The sudden rise in temperature was something else no one knew, and Arky was excited.
He started to swing away from the door, meaning to hurry directly across to the barracks.
That was when he saw the thing in the corner of the shed.
Nothing but an old bunch of rags, he thought, but something else suggested . . . well, something else. He went back to the glass, once more cupping his hands to the sides of his face. And no, by God, that thing in the corner was not just a bunch of rags.
Arky felt a flu-like weakness in the joints of his knees and the muscles of his thighs. The feeling spread upward into his stomach, dropping it, and then to his heart, speeding it up.
There was an alarming moment when he was almost certain he was going to drop to the ground in a faint.
Hey, y’big dumb Swede — why don’t you try breathing again? See if that helps any?
Arky took two big dry gasps of air, not caring much for the sound of them. His old man had sounded like that when he was having his heart attack, lying on the sofa and waiting for the ambulance to come.
He stepped away from the roll-up door, patting the center of his chest with the side of a closed fist. ‘Come on, honey. Take up d’slack, now.’
The sun, going down in a cauldron of blood, glared in his eyes. His stomach had continued to drop, making him feel on the verge of vomiting. The barracks all at once looked two, maybe even three miles away. He set off in that direction, reminding himself to breathe and concentrating on taking big, even steps. Part of him wanted to break into a run, and part of him understood that if he tried doing that, he really might faint.