‘It happened to me, too,’ Huddie said. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘Not ashamed,’ I said. ‘Trying to make him see, is all. Okay?’ I took in a deep breath, smelling the sweet air, and then it hit me that the kid’s father was also a road kill. I gave the kid a smile. ‘Oh well, thank God for small favors — the commode was right next to the basin, and I didn’t get hardly any on my shoes or the floor.’
‘And in the end,’ Sandy said, ‘the leaves came to nothing. And I mean that literally. They melted like the witch in The Wizard of Oz. You could see traces of them in Shed B for awhile, but after a week there was nothing but some little stains on the concrete. Yellowish, very pale.’
‘Yeah, and for the next couple of months I turned into one of those compulsive hand-
washers,’ I said. ‘There were days when I couldn’t bring myself to touch food. If my wife packed me sandwiches, I picked em up with a napkin and ate them that way, dropping the last piece out of the napkin and into my mouth so I never had to touch any of it with my fingers.
If I was by myself in my cruiser, I was apt to eat with my gloves on. And I kept thinking I’d get sick just the same. What I kept imagining was that gum disease where all your teeth fall out. But I got over it.’ I looked at Ned and waited until he met my eyes. ‘I got over it, son.’
He met my eyes, but there was nothing in them. It was funny. Like they were painted on, or something.
Okay?
NOW:
Sandy
Ned was looking at Phil. The boy’s face was calm enough, but I sensed rejection in his gaze, arid I think Phil sensed it, too. He sighed, folded his arms across his chest, and looked down as if to say he was done talking, his testimony was finished.
Ned turned to me. ‘What happened that night? When you dissected the bat?’
He kept calling it a bat and it hadn’t been a bat. That was just a word I’d used, what Curtis would have called a nail to hang my hat on. And all at once I was mad at him. More than mad
— pissed like a bear. And I was also angry at myself for feeling that way, for daring to feel that way. You see, mostly what I was angry at was the kid raising his head. Raising his eyes to mine. Asking his questions. Making his foolish assumptions, one of which happened to be that when I said bat I meant bat, and not some unspeakable indescribable thing that crept out of a crack in the floor of the universe and then died. But mostly it was him raising his head and his eyes. I know that doesn’t exactly make me out to be the prince of the world, but I’m not going to lie about it.
Up until then, what I’d mostly felt was sorry for him. Everything I’d done since he started showing up at the barracks had been based on that comfortable pity. Because all that time when he’d been washing windows and raking leaves and snowblowing his way through the drifts in the back parking lot, all that time he’d kept his head down. Meekly down. You didn’t have to contend with his eyes. You didn’t have to ask yourself any questions, because pity is comfortable. Isn’t it? Pity puts you right up on top. Now he had lifted his head, he was using my own words back at me, and there was nothing meek in his eyes. He thought he had a right, and that made me mad. He thought I had a responsibility — that what was being said out here wasn’t a gift being given but a debt being repaid — and that made me madder. That he was right made me maddest of all. I felt like shoving the heel of my hand up into the shelf of his chin and knocking him spang off the bench. He thought he had a right and I wanted to make him sorry.
Our feelings toward the young never much change in this regard, I suppose. I don’t have kids of my own. I’ve never been married — like Shirley, I guess I married Troop D. But I’ve got plenty of experience when it comes to the young, both inside and outside the barracks.
I’ve had them in my face plenty of times. It seems to me that when we can no longer pity them, when they reject our pity (not with indignation but with impatience), we pity ourselves instead. We want to know where they went, our comfy little ones, our baby buntings. Didn’t we give them piano lessons and show them how to throw the curveball? Didn’t we read them Where the Wild Things Are and help them search for Waldo? How dare they raise their eyes to ours and ask their rash and stupid questions? How dare they want more than we want to give?
‘Sandy? What happened when you guys dissected the — ‘
‘Not what you want to hear,’ I said, and when his eyes widened a little at the coldness he heard in my voice, I was not exactly displeased. ‘Not what your father wanted to see. Or Tony, either. Not some answer. There never was an answer. Everything to do with the Buick was a shimmer-mirage, like the ones you see on I-87 when it’s hot and bright. Except that’s not quite true, either. If it had been, I think we could have dismissed the Buick eventually.
The way you dismiss a murder when six months go by and you all just kind of realize you’re not going to catch whoever did it, that the guy is going to slide. With the Buick and the things that came out of the Buick, there was always something you could catch hold of. Something you could touch or hear. Or something you could
THEN
‘Oi,’ Sandy Dearborn said. ‘That smell,’
He put his hand up to his face but couldn’t actually touch his skin because of the plastic breathing cup he was wearing over his mouth and nose — the kind dentists put on before going prospecting. Sandy didn’t know how it was on germs, but the mask did nothing to stop the smell. It was that cabbagey aroma, and it choked the air of the storage closet as soon as Curt opened the stomach of the bat-thing.
‘We’ll get used to it,’ Curt said, his own breathing cup bobbing up and down on his face.
His and Sandy’s were blue; the Sergeant’s was a rather cute shade of candy-pink. Curtis Wilcox was a smart guy, right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about the smell. They didn’t get used to it. No one ever did.
Sandy couldn’t fault Trooper Wilcox’s preparation, however; it seemed perfect. Curt had swung home at the end of his shift and picked up his dissection kit. To this he had added a good microscope (borrowed from a friend at the university), several packets of surgical gloves, and a pair of extremely bright Tensor lamps. He told his wife he intended to examine a fox someone had shot behind the barracks.
‘You be careful,’ she said. ‘They can have rabies.’
Curt promised her he’d glove up, and it was a promise he meant to keep. Meant for all three of them to keep. Because the bat-thing might have something a lot worse than rabies, something which remained virulent long after its original host was dead. If Tony Schoondist and Sandy Dearborn had needed a reminder of this (they probably didn’t), they got it when Curt first closed the door at the foot of the stairs and then bolted it.
‘I’m in charge as long as that door’s locked,’ he said. His voice was flat and absolutely sure of itself. It was mostly Tony he was speaking to, because Tony was twice his age, and if anyone was his partner in this, it was the SC. Sandy was just along for the ride, and knew it.
‘Is that understood and agreed? Because if it isn’t, we can stop right n — ‘
‘It’s understood,’ Tony said. ‘In here you’re the general. Sandy and I are just a couple of buck privates. I have no problem with that. Just for Chrissake let’s get it over with.’
Curt opened his kit, which was almost the size of an Army footlocker. The interior was
packed with stainless steel instruments wrapped in chamois. On top of them were the dental masks, each in its own sealed plastic bag.
‘You really think these are necessary?’ Sandy asked.
Curt shrugged. ‘Better safe than sorry. Not that those things are worth much. We should probably be wearing respirators.’