From a Buick 8 by Stephen King

Ned grinned. ‘Administrative. Organizational. Bureaucratized. Compartmentalized.’

‘Quit showing off, kiddo,’ Huddie said. ‘You’re giving me a headache.’

‘Anyway, the thing at The Country Way’s not the kind of meeting I’m talking about. You guys must’ve … I mean, as time went on you must have . . .’

I knew what he was trying so say, and I knew something else at the same time: the boy would never quite understand the way it had really been. How mundane it had been, at least on most days. On most days we had just gone on. The way people go on after seeing a beautiful sunset, or tasting a wonderful champagne, or getting bad news from home. We had the miracle of the world out behind our workplace, but . that didn’t change the amount of paperwork we had to do or the way we brushed our teeth or how we made love to our

spouses. It didn’t lift us to new realms of existence or planes of perception. Our asses still itched, and we still scratched them when they did.

‘I imagine Tony and your Either talked it over a lot,’ I said, ‘but at work, at least for the rest of us, the Buick gradually slipped into the background like any other inactive case. It — ‘

‘Inactive!’ He nearly shouted it, and sounded so much like his father it was frightening. It was another chain, I thought, this link between father and son. The chain had been mangled, but it wasn’t broken.

‘For long periods of time, it was,’ I said. ‘Meantime, there were fender-benders and hit-and-runs and burglaries and dope and the occasional homicide.’

The look of disappointment on Ned’s face made me feel bad, as if I’d let him down.

Ridiculous, I suppose, but true. Then something occurred to me. ‘I can remember one bull-session about it. It was at — ‘

‘ — the picnic,’ Phil Candleton finished. ‘Labor Day picnic. That’s what you’re thinking about, right?’

I nodded. 1979. The old Academy soccer field, down by Redfern Stream. We all liked the Labor Day picnic a lot better than the one on the Fourth of July, partially because it was a lot closer to home and the men who had families could bring them, but mostly because it was just us —just Troop D. The Labor Day picnic really was a picnic.

Phil put his head back against the boards of the barracks and laughed. ‘Man, I’d almost forgotten about it. We talked about that damn yonder Buick, kid, and just about nothing else.

More we talked, the more we drank. My head ached for two days after.’

Huddie said: ‘That picnic’s always a good time. You were there last summer, weren’t you, Ned?’

‘Summer before last,’ Ned said. ‘Before Dad died.’ He was smiling. ‘That tire swing that goes out over the water? Paul Loving fell out of it and sprained his knee.’

We all laughed at that, Eddie as loud as the rest of us.

‘A lot of talk and not one single conclusion,’ I said. ‘But what conclusions could we draw?

Only one, really: when the temperature goes down inside that shed, things happen. Except even that turned out not to be a hard and fast rule. Sometimes — especially as the years went by — the temperature would go down a little, then rebound. Sometimes that humming noise would start . . . and then it would stop again, just cut out as if someone had pulled the plug on a piece of electrical equipment. Ennis disappeared with no lightshow and Jimmy the gerbil disappeared after a humungous lightshow and Roslyn didn’t disappear at all.’

‘Did you put her back into the Buick?’ Ned asked.

‘Nah,’ Phil said. ‘This is America, kid — no double jeopardy.’

‘Roslyn lived the rest of her life upstairs in the common room,’ I said. ‘She was three or four when she died. Tony said that was a fairly normal lifespan for a gerbil.’

‘Did more things come out of it? Out of the Buick?’

‘Yes. But you couldn’t correlate the appearance of those things with — ‘

‘What sort of things? And what about the bat? Did my father ever get around to dissecting it? Can I see it? Are there pictures, at least? Was it — ‘

‘Whoa, hold on,’ I said, raising my hand. ‘Eat a sandwich or something. Chill out.’

He picked up a sandwich and began to nibble, his eyes looking at me over the top. For just a moment he made me think of Roslyn the gerbil turning to look into the lens of the video camera, eyes bright and whiskers twitching.

‘Things appeared from time to time,’ I said, ‘and from time to time things — living things would disappear. Crickets. A frog. A butterfly. A tulip right out of the pot it was growing in.

But you couldn’t correlate the chill, the hum, or the lightshows with either the disappearances or what your dad called the Buick’s miscarriages. Nothing really correlates. The chill is pretty reliable, there’s never been one of those fireworks displays without a preceding temperature-drop — but not every temperature-drop means a display. Do you see what I mean?’

‘I think so,’ Ned said. ‘Clouds don’t always mean rain, but you don’t get rain without them.’

‘I couldn’t have put it more neatly,’ I said.

Huddie tapped Ned on the knee. ‘You know how folks say, “There’s an exception to every rule?” Well, in the case of the Buick, we’ve got about one rule and a dozen exceptions.

The driver himself is one — you know, the guy in the black coat and black hat. He disappeared, but not from the vicinity of the Buick.’

‘Can you say that for sure?’ Ned asked.

It startled me. For a boy to look like his father is natural. To sound like his father, too. But for a moment there, Ned’s voice and looks combined to make something more than a resemblance. Nor was I the only one who felt that. Shirley and Arky exchanged an uneasy glance.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked him.

‘Roach was reading a newspaper, wasn’t he? And from the way you described him, that probably took most of his concentration. So how do you know the guy didn’t come back to his car?’

I’d had twenty years to think about that day and the consequences of that day. Twenty years, and the idea of the Roadmaster’s driver coming back (perhaps even sneaking back) had never once occurred to me. Or, so far as I knew, to anyone else. Brad Roach said the guy hadn’t returned, and we’d simply accepted that. Why? Because cops have built-in bullshit detectors, and in that case none of the needles swung into the red. Never even twitched, really. Why would they? Brad Roach at least thought he was telling the truth. That didn’t mean he knew what he was talking about, though.

‘I guess that it’s possible,’ I said.

Ned shrugged as if to say, Well there you go.

‘We never had Sherlock Holmes or Lieutenant Columbo working out of D Troop,’ I said. I

thought I sounded rather defensive. I felt rather defensive. ‘When you get right down to it, we’re just the mechanics of the legal system. Blue-collar guys who actually wear gray collars and have a slightly better than average education. We can work the phones, compile evidence if there’s evidence to compile, make the occasional deduction. On good days we can make fairly brilliant deductions. But with the Buick there was no consistency, hence no basis for deduction, brilliant or otherwise.’

‘Some of the guys thought it came from space,’ Huddle said. ‘That it was . . . oh, I don’t know, a disguised scout-ship, or something. They had the idea Ennis was abducted by an ET

disguised to look at least passably human in his — its — black coat and hat. This talk was at the picnic — the Labor Day picnic, okay?’

‘Yeah,’ Ned said.

‘That was one seriously weird get-together, kiddo,’ Huddie said. ‘It seems to me that everyone got a lot drunker’n usual, and a lot faster, but no one got rowdy, not even the usual suspects like Jackie O’Hara and Christian Soder. It was very quiet, especially once the shirts-and-skins touch football game was over.

‘I remember sitting on a bench under an elm tree with a bunch of guys, all of us moderately toasted, listening to Brian Cole tell about these flying saucer sightings around the powerlines in New Hampshire — only a few years before, that was — and how some woman claimed to have been abducted and had all these probes stuck up inside her, entrance ramps and exit ramps both.’

‘Is that what my father believed? That aliens abducted his partner?’

‘No,’ Shirley said. ‘Something happened here in 1988 that was so . . . so outrageous and beyond belief . . . so fucking awful. . .’

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