Curt had the good sense to keep quiet while in the SC’s office. Later, however, he unburdened himself to Sandy, speaking with surprising bitterness as the two of them stood outside at the far corner of the barracks. ‘If I’d wanted a marriage counselor, I would have consulted the goddam Yellow Pages,’ he said.
Sandy offered him a smile, one without much humor in it. ‘I think you better start listening for the pop,’ he said.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The pop. Very distinctive sound. You hear it when your head finally comes out of your ass.’
Curtis stared at him, hard little roses of color burning high up on his cheekbones. ‘Am I missing something here, Sandy?’
‘Yes.’
‘What? For God’s sake, what?’
‘Your job and your life,’ Sandy said. ‘Not necessarily in that order. You are experiencing a problem of perspective. That Buick is starting to look too big to you.’
‘Too . . . !’ Curt hit his forehead with the palm of his hand in that way he had. Then he turned and looked out at the Short Hills. At last he swung back to Sandy. ‘It’s something from another world, Sandy — from another world. How can a thing like that look too big?’
‘That’s exactly your problem,’ Sandy replied. ‘Your problem of perspective.’
He had an idea that the next thing Curtis said would be the beginning of an argument, possibly a bitter one. So before Curt could say anything, Sandy went inside. And perhaps that talk did some good, because as August gave way to September, Curt’s all but constant requests for more surveillance time stopped. Sandy Dearborn never tried to tell himself that the kid had seen the light, but he did seem to understand that he’d gone as far as he could, at least for the time being. Which was good, but maybe not quite good enough. Sandy thought that the Buick was always going to look too big to Curtis. But then, there have always been two sorts of people in the world. Curt was of the sort who believed satisfaction actually did bring felines back from the other side of the great divide.
He began to show up at the barracks with biology books instead of Field and Stream. The one most commonly observed under his arm or lying on the toilet tank in the crapper was Dr John H. Maturin’s Twenty Elementary Dissections, Harvard University Press, 1968. When Buck
Flanders and his wife went over to Curt’s for dinner one evening, Michelle Wilcox complained about her husband’s ‘gross new hobby’. He had started getting specimens from a medical supply house, she said, and the area of the basement which he had designated as his darkroom-to-be only the year before now smelled of mortuary chemicals.
Curt started with mice and a guinea pig, then moved on to birds, eventually working his way up to a horned owl. Sometimes he brought specimens to work. ‘You haven’t really lived,’
Matt Babicki told Orville Garrett and Steve Devoe one day, ‘until you go downstairs for a fresh box of ballpoint pens and find a jar of formaldehyde with an owl-eye in it sitting on top of the Xerox machine. Man, that wakes you up.’
Once the owl had been conquered, Curtis moved on to bats. He did eight or nine of those, each specimen from a different species. A couple he caught himself in his back yard; the rest he ordered from a biological supply house in The Burg. Sandy never forgot the day Curtis showed him a South American vampire bat pinned to a board. The thing was furry, brownish on the belly, and velvet-black on the membranous wings. Its tiny pointed teeth were bared in a psychotic smile. Its guts were laid open in a teardrop shape by Curt’s increasingly skilled technique. Sandy believed Curt’s high school biology teacher — the one who had given him the C — would have been surprised at how fast his old student was learning.
Of course when desire drives, any fool can be a professor.
It was while Curt Wilcox was learning the fine art of dissection from Dr Maturin that Jimmy and Roslyn took up residence in the Buick 8. They were Tony’s brainstorm. He had it one day at the Tri-Town Mall, while his wife tried on clothes in Country Casuals. An improbable sign in the window of My Pet caught his eye: COME ON IN AND JOIN OUR GERBIL RIOT!
Tony didn’t join the gerbil riot just then — his wife would have had a thousand questions
— but he sent big George Stankowski back the very next day with more cash from the contingency fund and orders to buy a pair of gerbils. Also a plastic habitat for them to live in.
‘Should I get them some food, too?’ George asked.
‘No,’ Tony answered. ‘Absolutely not. We’re going to buy a couple of gerbils and then let them starve to death out in the shed.’
‘Really? That seems sort of mean to — ‘
Tony sighed. ‘Get them food, George, yes. By all means get them food.’
The only specification Tony made concerning the habitat was that it fit comfortably on the Buick’s front seat. George got a nice one, not top-of-the-line but almost. It was made of a yellow see-through plastic and consisted of a long corridor with a boxy room at either end.
One was the gerbil dining room and the other was the gerbil version of Gold’s Gym. The dining room had a food-trough and a water-bottle clipped to the side; the gym had an exercise wheel.
‘They live better than some people,’ Orvie Garrett said.
Phil, who was watching Roslyn take a shit in the food-trough, said: ‘Speak for yourself.’
Dicky-Duck Eliot, perhaps not the swiftest horse ever to canter around life’s great racetrack, wanted to know why they were keeping gerbils in the Buick. Wasn’t that sort of dangerous?
‘Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?’ Tony asked in an oddly gentle voice. ‘We’ll just see if it is or not.’
On a day not long after Troop D acquired Jimmy and Roslyn, Tony Schoondist crossed his own personal Rubicon and lied to the press.
Not that the representative of the Fourth Estate was in this case very impressive, just a weedy redheaded boy of twenty or so, a summer intern at The Statler County American who would be going back to Ohio State in another week or so. He had a way of listening to you with his mouth hung partway open that made him look, in Arky’s words, like a stark raving natural-born fool. But he wasn’t a fool, and he’d spent most of one golden September afternoon listening to Mr Bradley Roach. Brad gave the young reporter quite an earful about the man with the Russian accent (by this time Brad was positive the guy had been Russian) and the car the man had left behind. The weedy redhead, Homer Oosler by name, wanted to do a feature story on all of this and go back to college with a bang. Sandy thought the young man could imagine a front-page headline with the words MYSTERY CAR in it. Perhaps even RUSSIAN SPY’S MYSTERY CAR.
Tony never hesitated, just went ahead and lied. He undoubtedly would have done the same thing even if the reporter presenting himself that day had been case-hardened old Trevor Ronnick, who owned the American and had forgotten more stories than the redhead would ever write.
‘Car’s gone,’ Tony said, and there it was: lie told, Rubicon crossed.
‘Gone?’ Homer Oosler asked, clearly disappointed. He had a big old Minolta camera on his lap. PROPERTY OF COUNTY AMERICAN was Dymotaped across the back of the case. ‘Gone where?’
‘State Impound Bureau,’ Tony said, creating this impressive-sounding organization on the spot. ‘In Philly.’
‘Why?’
‘They auction unclaimed rolling iron. After they search em for drugs, of course.’
‘Course. Do you have any paperwork on it?’
‘Must have,’ Tony said. ‘Got it on everything else. I’ll look for it, give you a ring.’
‘How long do you think that’ll take, Sergeant Schoondist?’
‘Awhile, son.’ Tony waved his hand at his in/out basket, which was stacked high with papers. Oosler didn’t need to know that most of them were the week’s junkalogue from Scranton — everything from updates on retirement benefits to the schedule for autumn
softball — and would be in the wastebasket before the Sarge went home. That weary wave of the hand suggested that there were similar piles of paper everywhere. ‘Hard keeping up with all this stuff, you know. They say things’ll change when we start getting computerized, but that won’t be this year.’
‘I go back to school next week.’
Tony leaned forward in his chair and looked at Oosler keenly. ‘And I hope you work hard,’
he said. ‘It’s a tough world out there, son, but if you work hard you can make it.’
A couple of days after Homer Oosler’s visit, the Buick fired up another of its lightstorms.