Tony stepped away from the roll-up door. His posture was easy and relaxed, but his face was very pale. The sight of that thing in the corner had affected him, too, even through a pane of glass. Sandy felt the same way himself. But he could also sense Sergeant Schoondist’s excitement, the balls-to-the-wall curiosity he shared with Curt. The throbbing undertone that said Holy shit, do you fuckin BELIEVE it! Sandy heard it and recognized it for what it was, although he felt none of it himself, not a single iota. He didn’t think any of the others did, either. Certainly Huddie’s curiosity — and Arky’s — had faded quickly enough. ‘Gone the way of the blue suede shoe,’ as Curtis might have said.
‘You men on duty listen up to me, now,’ Tony said. He was wearing his slanted little grin, but to Sandy it looked a bit forced that night. ‘There’s fires in Statler, floods in Leesburg, and a rash of Piggly Wiggly robberies down in Pogus County; we suspect the Amish.’
There was some laughter at this.
‘So what are you waiting for?’
‘There was a general exodus of Troopers on duty followed by the sound of Chevrolet V-8
engines starting up. The off-duty fellows hung around for awhile, but nobody had to tell them to move along, move along, come on, boys, show’s over. Sandy asked the Sarge if he should also saddle up and ride.
‘No, Trooper,’ he said. ‘You’re with me.’ And he started briskly toward the walk-in door, pausing only long enough to examine the items Sandy had put into the carton: one of the
evidence-documenting Polaroids, extra film, a yardstick, an evidence-collection kit. Sandy had also grabbed a couple of green plastic garbage bags from the kitchenette.
‘Good job, Sandy.’
‘Thanks, sir.’
‘Ready to go in?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Scared as me, or not quite that scared?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Me, either. But I’m scared, all right. If I faint, you catch me.’
‘Just fall in my direction, sir.’
He laughed. ‘Come on. Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.’
Scared or not, the two of them made a pretty thorough investigation. They collaborated on a diagram of the she’d interior, and when Curt later complimented Sandy on it, Sandy nodded and agreed that it had been a good one. Good enough to take into court, actually. Still, a lot of the lines on it were wavery. Their hands began to shake almost from the moment they entered the shed, and didn’t stop until they were back out again.
They opened the trunk because it had been open when Arky first looked in and noticed the thing in the corner, and although it was as empty as ever, they took Polaroids of it. They likewise photo’d the thermometer (which by then had gotten all the way up to seventy degrees), mostly because Tony thought Curt would want them to. And they took pictures of the corpse in the corner, took them from every angle they could think of. Every Polaroid showed that unspeakable single eye. It was shiny, like fresh tar. Seeing himself reflected in it made Sandy Dearborn feel like screaming. And every two or three seconds, one of them would look back over his shoulder at the Buick Roadmaster.
When they were done with the photos, some of which they took with the yardstick lying beside the corpse, Tony shook out one of the garbage bags. ‘Get a shovel,’ he said.
‘Don’t you want to leave it where it is until Curt — ‘
‘Probationary Trooper Wilcox can look at it down in the supply closet,’ Tony said. His voice was oddly tight — strangled, almost — and Sandy realized he was working very hard not to be sick. Sandy’s own stomach took a queasy little lurch, perhaps in sympathy. ‘He can look at it there to his heart’s content. For once we don’t have to worry about breaking the chain of evidence, because no district attorney is ever going to be involved. Meantime, we’re scooping this shit up.’ He wasn’t shouting, but a raw little edge had come into his voice.
Sandy took a shovel from where it hung on the wall and slid the blade beneath the dead creature. The wings made a papery and somehow terrible crackling sound. Then one of them fell back, revealing a black and hairless side. For the second time since the two of them had
stepped in, Sandy felt like screaming. He could not have told why, exactly, but there was something deep down in his head begging not to be shown any more.
And all the time they were smelling it. That sour, cabbagey reek.
Sandy observed sweat standing out all over Tony Schoondist’s forehead in fine little dots.
Some of these had broken and run down his cheeks, leaving tracks like tears.
‘Go on,’ he said, holding the bag open. ‘Go on, now, Sandy. Drop it in there before I lose my groceries.’
Sandy tilted it into the bag and felt a little bit better when the weight slid off the shovel.
After Tony had gotten a sack of the liquid-absorbing red sawdust they kept for oil-spills and sprinkled it over the gooey stain in the corner, both of them felt better. Tony twirled the top of the garbage bag with the creature inside, then knotted it. Once that was done, the two of them started backing toward the door.
Tony stopped just before they reached it. ‘Photo that,’ he said, pointing to a place high on the roll-up door behind the Buick — the door through which Johnny Parker had towed the car in the first place. To Tony Schoondist and Sandy Dearborn, that already seemed like a long time ago. ‘And that, arid there, and over there.’
At first Sandy didn’t see what the Sarge was pointing at. He looked away, blinked his eyes once or twice, then looked back. And there it was, three or four dark green smudges that made Sandy think of the dust that rubs off a moth’s wings. As kids they had solemnly assured each other that mothdust was deadly poison, it would blind you if you got some on your fingers and then rubbed your eyes.
‘You see what happened, don’t you?’ Tony asked as Sandy raised the Polaroid and sighted in on the first mark. The camera seemed very heavy and his hands were still shivering, but he got it done.
‘No, Sarge, I, ah . . . don’t guess I do.’
‘Whatever that thing is — bird, bat, some kind of robot drone — it flew out of the trunk when the lid came open. It hit the back door, that’s the first smudge, and then it started bouncing off the walls. Ever seen a bird that gets caught in a shed or a barn?’
Sandy nodded.
‘Like that.’ Tony wiped sweat off his forehead and looked at Sandy. It was a look the younger man never forgot. He had never seen the Sarge’s eyes so naked. It was, he thought, the look you sometimes saw on the faces of small children when you came to break up a domestic disturbance.
‘Man,’ Tony said heavily. ‘Fuck.’
Sandy nodded.
Tony looked down at the bag. ‘You think it looks like a bat?’
‘Yeah,’ Sandy said, then, ‘No.’ After another pause he added, ‘Bullshit.’
Tony barked a laugh that sounded somehow haggard. ‘That’s very definitive. If you were
on the witness stand, no defense attorney could peel that back.’
‘I don’t know, Tony.’ What Sandy did know was that he wanted to stop shooting the shit and get back out into the open air. ‘What do you think?’
‘Well, if I drew it, it’d look like a bat,’ Tony said. The Polaroids we took also make it look like a bat. But. . . I don’t know exactly how to say it, but . . .’
‘It doesn’t feel like a bat,’ Sandy said.
Tony smiled bleakly and pointed a finger at Sandy like a gun. ‘Very zen, Grasshoppah. But those marks on the wall suggest it at least acted like a bat, or a trapped bird. Flew around in here until it dropped dead in the corner. Shit, for all we know, it died of fright.’
Sandy recalled the glaring dead eye, a thing almost too alien to look at, and thought that for the first time in his life he could really understand the concept Sergeant Schoondist had articulated. Die of fright? Yes, it could be done. It really could. Then, because the Sarge seemed to be waiting for something, he said: ‘Or maybe it hit the wall so hard it broke its neck.’ Another idea came to him. ‘Or — listen, Tony — maybe the air killed it.’
‘Say what?’
‘Maybe — ‘
But Tony’s eyes had lit up and he was nodding. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Maybe the air on the other side of the Buick’s trunk is different air. Maybe it’d taste like poison gas to us . . . rupture our lungs . . .’