‘What?’ Ned asked. ‘For God’s sake, what?
Shirley ignored the question. I don’t think she even heard it. ‘A few days afterward, I asked your father flat-out what he believed. He said it didn’t matter.’
Ned looked as if he hadn’t heard her correctly. ‘It didn’t matter?’
‘That’s what he said. He believed that, whatever the Buick was, it didn’t matter in the great scheme of things. In that big picture you were talking about. I asked him if he thought someone was using it, maybe to watch us . . . if it was some sort of television . . . and he said,
“I think it’s forgotten.” I still remember the flat, certain way he said it, as if he was talking about … I don’t know . . . something as important as a king’s treasure buried under the desert since before the time of Christ or something as unimportant as a postcard with the wrong address sitting in a Dead Letter file somewhere. “Having a wonderful time, wish you were here” and who cares, because all that was long, long ago. It comforted me and at the same time it chilled me to think anything so strange and awful could just be forgotten . . .
misplaced . . . overlooked. I said that, and your dad, he laughed. Then he flapped his arm at the western horizon and he said, “Shirley, tell me something. How many nuclear weapons do
you think this great nation of ours has got stored out there in various places between the Pennsylvania-Ohio line and the Pacific Ocean? And how many of them do you think will be left behind and forgotten over the next two or three centuries?”‘
We were all silent for a moment, thinking about this.
‘I was considering quitting the job,’ Shirley said at last. ‘I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about poor old Mister Dillon, and in my mind quitting was almost a done deal. It was Curt who talked me into staying, and he did it without even knowing he was doing it. “I think it’s forgotten,” he said, and that was good enough for me. I stayed, and I’ve never been sorry, either. This is a good place, and most of the guys who work here are good Troops. That goes for the ones who are gone, too. Like Tony.’
‘I love you, Shirley, marry me,’ Huddie said. He put an arm around her and puckered his lips. Not a pretty sight, all in all.
She elbowed him. ‘You’re married already, foolish.’
Eddie J. spoke up then. ‘If your dad believed anything, it was that yonder machine came from some other dimension.’
‘Another dimension? You’re kidding.’ He looked at Eddie closely. ‘No. You’re not kidding.’
‘And he didn’t think it was planned at all,’ Eddie went on. ‘Not, you know, like you’d plan to send a ship across the ocean or a satellite into space. In some ways, I’m not even sure he thought it was real.’
‘You lost me,’ the kid said.
‘Me, too,’ Shirley agreed.
‘He said . . .’ Eddie shifted on the bench. He looked out again at the grassy place where Shed A had once stood. ‘This was at the O’Day farm, if you want to know the truth. That day.
You hafta realize we were out there almost seven goddam hours, parked in the corn and waiting for those two dirtbags to come back. Cold. Couldn’t run the engine, couldn’t run the heater. We talked about everything — hunting, fishing, bowling, our wives, our plans. Curt said he was going to get out of the PSP in another five years — ‘
‘He said that?’ Ned was round-eyed.
Eddie gave him an indulgent look. ‘From time to time we all say that, kid. Just like all the junkies say they’re going to quit the spike. I told him how I’d like to open my own security business in The Burg, also how I’d like to get me a brand-new Winnebago. He told me about how he wanted to take some science courses at Horlicks and how he was getting resistance from your mom. She said it was their job to put the kids through school, not him. He caught a lot of flak from her but never blamed her. Because she didn’t know why he wanted to take those courses, what had got him interested, and he couldn’t tell her. That’s how we got around to the Buick. And what he said — I remember this clear as the sky on a summer morning —
was that we saw it as a Buick because we had to see it as something.’
‘Have to see it as something,’ Ned muttered. He was leaning forward and rubbing the center
of his forehead with two fingers, like a man with a headache.
‘You look as confused as I felt, but I did sort of understand what he meant. In here.’ Eddie tapped his chest, above his heart.
Ned turned back to me. ‘Sandy, that day at the picnic, did any of you talk about . . .’ He trailed off without finishing.
‘Talk about what?’ I asked him.
He shook his head, looked down at the remains of his sandwich, and popped the last bite into his mouth. ‘Never mind. Isn’t important. Did my dad really dissect the bat-thing you guys found?’
‘Yep. After the second lightshow but before the Labor Day picnic. He — ‘
‘Tell the kid about the leaves,’ Phil said. ‘You forgot that part.’
And I had. Hell, I hadn’t even thought about the leaves in six or eight years. ‘You tell him,’
I said. ‘You’re the one who had your hands on them.’
Phil nodded, sat silent for a few moments, and then began to speak staccato, as if giving a report to a superior officer.
NOW:
Phil
The second lightshow happened midafternoon. Okay? Curt goes into the shed with the rope on when it’s over and brings out the gerbil whatchacallit. We see one of the critters is gone.
There’s some more talk. Some more picture-taking. Sergeant Schoondist says okay, okay, everyone as you were, who’s on duty out in the hutch. Brian Cole says ‘Me, Sarge.’
‘The rest of us go back in the barracks. Okay? And I hear Curtis say to the Sarge, “I’m gonna dissect that thing before it disappears like everything else. Will you help me?” And the Sarge says he will — that night, if Curt wants. Curt says “Why not right now?” and the Sarge says, “Because you got a patrol to finish. Shift-and-a-half. John Q. is depending on you, boy, and lawbreakers tremble at the sound of your engyne.” That’s the way he talked, sometimes, like a piney-woods preacher. And he never said engine, always engyne.
‘Curt, he don’t argue. Knows better. Goes off. Around five o’clock Brian Cole comes in and gets me. Asks will I cover the shed for him while he goes to the can. I say sure. I go out there.
Take a look inside. Situation normal, fi’-by. Thermometer’s gone up a degree. I go into the hutch. Decide die hutch is too hot, okay? There’s an L.L. Bean catalogue on the chair. I go to grab that. Just as I put my fingers on it, I hear this creak-thump sound. Only one sound like it, when you unlatch the trunk of your car and it springs up hard. I go rushing out of the hutch.
Over to the shed windows. Buick’s trunk’s open. All this what I thought at first was paper, charred bits of paper, is whooshing up out of the trunk. Spinning around like they were caught in a cyclone. But the dust on the floor wasn’t moving. Not at all. The only moving air was coming out of the trunk. And then I saw all the pieces of paper looked pretty much the same and I decided they were leaves. Turned out that was what they were.’
I took my notebook out of my breast pocket. Clicked out the tip of my ballpoint and drew this:
‘It looks sort of like a smile,’ the kid said.
‘Like a goddam grin, ‘ I said. ‘Only there wasn’t just one of them. Was hundreds. Hundreds of black grins swirling and spinning around. Some landed on the Buick’s roof. Some dropped back into the trunk. Most of em went on the floor. I ran to get Tony. He came out with the video camera. He was all red in the face and muttering, ‘What now, what next, what the hell, what now?’ Like that. It was sort of funny, but only later on, okay? Wasn’t funny at the time, believe me.
‘We looked in the window. Saw the leaves scattered all across the cement floor. There were almost as many as you might have on your lawn after a big October windstorm blows through. Only by then they were curling up at the corners. Made em look a little less like grins and a little more like leaves. Thank God. And they weren’t staying black. They were turning whitish-gray right in front of our eyes. And thinning. Sandy was there by then. Didn’t make it in time for the lightshow, but turned up in time for the leafshow.’